Michael Swanwick Quotes

It really is a pity. Esme was so full of curiosity and enthusiasm when she was a child. She’d make a great biologist. But it was her misfortune to be born wealthy. She had dreams. But her parents had too much money to allow that.

You have to spell things out for the press—you can’t rely on them to know even the simplest things.

But the way she saw it, you only had so much organization in your life. You had to choose: Invest it in your research, or fritter it away on housework.

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.

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

We did it the way we did it because according to the records, that’s the way we did it. The rules against paradox bind us as tightly as they do you.

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.

Common sense has very little to do with physics.

He was accustomed to questioning an essentially impassive universe. The physical world might be maddeningly close-lipped about its secrets, but it didn’t lie, and it never actively tried to deceive you.

Everything was dying, yet death did not suffice. Life had hidden resources. In a thousand ways it was concentrating strength, hoarding its energies in seed, chrysalis, and nectar, preparing for the warrior sweep out of exile that would undo the defeat of winter. Spring was implicit.

It pained him to think how naive he had once been.

“Fool. There is no why. The very word is a semantic fallacy. Ask me how and I can lay out for you cause and effect, one thing leading to another, the alcohol acting on a grieving man’s mind, the door inadequately guarded, the people within isolated from the common lot of humanity by the dreadful secret of their ancestry.”
He rattled his glass.
Nathan refilled it.
Faust drank. “But to ask why,” he continued, “implies that things happen for a purpose, and they do not. There is no purpose, no direction, no guidance to events. Nothing means anything. The world is a howling desert of meaningless, and reason is useless before it. There is only blind event.”
He stared off into the bleak landscapes of the future while Nathan refilled his glass and refilled his glass and refilled his glass.
He saw so clearly now, without delusion or hope. It was a crystal night of the soul.

He had for many years thought of Christ as a rival in greatness. Now he realized they were both brothers in misery. Their enemies were identical: the howling mob, the fearful, the inferior, the baying hounds of conventional morality.

He was not actually drunk, but emotion made him feel as if he were. Sorrow, loss, anger—these were as good as a bottle of the very worst gin.

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.