Michael Shea Quotes

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

Good soldiers stay alive by being unsentimental and having a quick eye for the main chance.

It is a bitter thing that each of us must finally be blown out like a candle, and have the unique ardor of his individual flame choked off, and sucked utterly away like smoke in the dark. Do we ever accept this in our hearts, any of us? The waste of knowledge! It never ceases to be...infuriating.

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

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

The assumption that we would ever be called upon to perform this second task now appeared quite clearly to me as the most extravagant folly, based on a wild delusion conceived by a raving idiot.

Present action, though futile, is preferable to passive acceptance of such a fate as awaits us.

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.

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.

For the past three years, young Wimfort had enjoyed so ample a competence from his parent, that he’d been able to buy his way deep into the mysteries of the arts of Power. He purchased no real understanding, of course, for that’s bought by the coin of toil and thought.

By his twentieth year he was a thorough adept in all of what we may term the “carnival arts,” and already a widely traveled young man. From mastery of the mountebank’s larcenous skills to the study of outright felonious appropriation, and all its subsidiary sciences, proved but a short step for Nifft, who always credited his early “dramatic training” with his success as a thief, vowing it had given him a rare grasp of his trade’s fundamentals: lying, imposture and nimble movement.

Rage and wounded pride look painful on a young face. Sixteen is a difficult age to get on with. There’s much to like—the freshness, the force of conviction. But there is also a certain arrogance, an inevitable concomitant of development, perhaps, which one must always struggle to forgive.

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

The demons are not our ancestors—we are theirs. The greeds and lusts, the wealth of horrors here, are not the archetypes of our own—they are the derivatives, the dreadful perfectings of all the evil that men have spawned and nourished. Call Man a great, roasting beast, spitted and turning above the fire of his own unending cruelty. The things of this world then, and of those yet farther down, are the drippings of the tortured giant, Man.

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