Michael Swanwick Quotes

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

The law," Hoess suggested, "might not be entirely unhelpful here.

(All human beings have their price, and quite often it is surprisingly small. The trick consists of knowing exactly what that price is, when they themselves do not.)

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.

It was not possible for her to rejoin the unthinking world, becoming as she had been before, sleepily and smugly ignorant of consequences. There were thoughts that once thought, could not be unthought.

Incolore sighed. “The loyalty of the systematically betrayed. Is there anything sadder?”

I have no need to expose myself to your flummery," Mette said with dignity. "I believe in order that I may know. I do not know in order to believe."
"I marvel at your spite. Of what possible benefit can this willful ignorance be to you?

Okay, so we broke the rules. That's good! There are no more rules—they're broken. Anything is possible now. We'll find a solution. There has to be a solution. There always is."
"Not in my experience." They were, he realized, standing on opposite sides of the great divide that separates those who deal with scientific fact and those who deal with the consequences of human actions. Which is to say, those who believe in a rational universe and those who know that, given the existence of human beings, there is no such thing. "You and I belong to entirely different universes, did you know that?

The secret of a good scam is not to get greedy.

A magician does not send messages, you know—he orchestrates reality.

It was the kind of discovery that shatters old universes and opens up new ones in their place.

Your girlfriend is none too tightly wrapped, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. I don’t think she’s actually crazy, but—I been watching her a long time, and it is my considered opinion that she is none too clear on where the line between fantasy and reality should be drawn.

What you propose to do today is to bring civilization to a lawless corner of the world. I know that you claim more modest ambitions. But when the protection of law is extended to the innocent and weak, that is civilization. Now I hold that in the natural state, there are only two kinds of people in the world—the men with guns, and the victims. And the one kind feeds off the other.

If I have to play your stupid games, at least I don’t have to pretend to enjoy them.

Well, birth control's easy. The first thing you have to know is that it doesn't work."
"What?"
"Not consistently. No matter how careful you are, every time you play hide-the-salami with the boys, you're running the risk of ending up with a belly full of consequences."
"But—"
"Contraceptive spells are never entirely reliable. That's because their power comes from the Mother, and the Mother wants children. Each cantrip has its loophole, every fetish its flaw. Ultimately, contraception is just a way of luring you into playing her game."
"You mean that sooner or later it's going to fail me?"
"That's not what I said. It works well enough for enough of us that the rest will take their chances. But the odds are never going to be as good as you'd like them to be. There are no guarantees.