Michael Shea Quotes

Granting that our knowledge be limited, what can it profit us to traffic in lurid fantasies and errant imaginings? When—certainty failing us—we must speculate, let us recognize the difference between careful enumeration of reasonable hypotheses, and the reckless multiplication of bizarre conceptions.

You realize of course, Barnar, that it is simply not possible that we're actually doing this?"
"I've come to the same comforting conclusion, old friend. Therefore let's away—an impossibility can only do us an unreal sort of harm, after all.

And you could see at a glance that Defalk was a simple man who wanted no more than to be brilliantly rich, admired, and unencumbered with work. His face said it so plainly: “I’m an excellent fellow. Isn’t such a life no more than my proper portion?”

The great in Evil, and the great in [Goodness|Good]]—both leave an immortal residue.

I shall present as certain only those data corroborated by exhaustive research, or by my own personal investigations, as I am not untraveled for a bookish man. Wherever doubt exists, I shall unambiguously state its degree and nature, along with whatever grounds I may have for preferring one hypothesis over another. If, despite all I have said, the reader disdains such honest ambiguity, and stubbornly prefers the unequivocal assertiveness to be found in factitious travelogues penned by raffish “explorers,” or in the specious “natural histories” compiled by crapulous and unprincipled hacks who have never left their squalid lofts in Scrivener’s Row, then there is nothing further I can do, and I leave him, with apologies, to his deception.

Is it not unsettling to consider the blind unlikelihoods that shape one’s fate?

We’re none of us more than wisps of desire and imagining! What man is not, at the center of his mind, a ghostly wish-to-be haunting the jerry-built habitation of his imperfect acts? Haunting the maze of what-has-been?

"Come on," I said. "We have to try. The effort is utterly pointless, but inaction seems an even greater agony."

Weigh then your wealth, and judge if it’s more dear
To you than life. If not, your course is clear.

Dalissem chuckled. It felt like being grinned at by a big mountain cat—delightful for the beauty of the animal, disturbing for the possible sequel.

Can it be your spirit does not thrive? Can it be you’ve weighed your life of kissing arse and crouching before fat purses, and have found it wanting?

But ah! what a drear hell it was we now had to venture through! What a maelstrom of relentless gorging, one creature upon another! The claws and jaws of the upper world are red enough—who denies it?—but the carnage has intermissions, periods of amiable association, zones of green peace and fructification. In the subworlds, the merciless seethe of appetites never simmers down.

At that age you invent extravagant compensations for bruises to your dignity.

It’s always been an exceedingly curious thing to me, just how incurious most people are about all save their own little island of time and place in the world.

Ambitious dabblers in sorcery add much to the hell that is on earth.