Michael Swanwick Quotes

This is the price you must pay for knowledge: You must understand and acknowledge its consequences.

Everybody dies. So much of growing up consists of coming to grips with this fact.

She had learned at an early age that it was not how often you were wrong that counted in science, but how often you were right. One startling hit covered a multitude of bad guesses.

Now here is a treasure, Averroës Commentaries on Aristotle in a tolerable translation from the Arabic by Gerard of Cremona." He lasciviously stroked the red leather boards, knowing well how his pupil ached for the chance to pore through it. "A liar's gloss on a liar's lies. Surely this is a rare criminal.

(Information is information, Faust. Knowledge is knowledge. I make no distinction between the high and the low.)

The universe has backed you into another corner—you can kill or die. There are no other choices. Doesn’t that make you angry? Doesn’t it make you want revenge? Or are you going to truckle to Dame Fate one more time, to be crushed and for all I know resurrected to run the maze of torment again and yet again? Stand up on your hind legs for once!

Margarete saw, and disapproved, and understood. It was perfectly natural that Youth, being given a new and revolutionary truth, should embrace it too eagerly, should defend it too loudly, should proclaim it in the extremest terms and without regard for the sensibilities of others. Natural, too, that Age, vested as it was in things as they had always been, should reject the truth as unsettling and dangerous. In the ace of such strong emotions, the only sane thing to do therefore was to embrace the truth circumspectly, to hide one’s new allegiance from one’s elders.

Our records must be scrupulous, whether they show what we want them to show or not.

The intent of the Goddess is neither known nor knowable. She makes us dance, male and female, in ever-converging gyres that bring us ultimately each to our own destiny, and that destiny is always the same and never escapable. She does not tell us why."
"You said there were no outside forces ordering our lives. That there was nothing but chance and random occurrence."
He shrugged.
"You did!"
"The Goddess is unknowable and her aims unfathomable, unpredictable, and ineluctable. They might as well be random. We live our brief lives in ignorance and then we die. That's all.

This was human glory—a sad and exhaust-darkened memorial for good citizens to ignore and drunks to piss upon on their way home from the brothels. Here was the omega-point of all ambition.

Paid off? Do you mean bribery?"
"That is, umm, not an entirely pleasant word for it." Dreschler's doughy face took on a pained expression. "It is more in the nature of an advance payment to ensure the labor force will be satisfied with the negotiated wage schedules.

What the common man calls Evil, he once told me, is nothing more than the fear of one’s own potential.

And she was off, leaping like a salmon from idea to idea. Hers was the kind of fast and playful intellect that enjoyed tossing a stone into the pond of received wisdom, just to see the frogs jump.

That is the true measure of love, you see, the evil one will stoop to for its sake...

Money can always be traced. It leaves a trail of slime behind it wherever it goes.