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Can you really kill the Goddess?" Jane asked. "You stupid gobbet of flesh! Don't you understand yet? There is no Goddess." "No," Jane cried. "You sai… - Michael Swanwick
" "Can you really kill the Goddess?" Jane asked.
"You stupid gobbet of flesh! Don't you understand yet? There is no Goddess."
"No," Jane cried. "You said yourself—"
"I lied," the dragon said with a fearful complacency. "Everyone you have ever met has lied to you. Life exists, and all who live are born to suffer. The best moments are fleeting and bought with the coin of exquisite torment. All attachments end. All loved ones die. All that you value passes away. In such a vexatious existence laughter is madness and joy is folly. Shall we accept that it all happens for no reason, with no cause? That there is nobody to blame but ourselves but that accepting the responsibility is pointless for doing so cannot ease, defer, or deaden the pain? Not likely! It is so much more comforting to erect a straw figure on which to blame it all.
"Some bow down before the Goddess and others curse her every name. There is not a fart's difference between the two approaches. They cling to the fiction of the Goddess because admitting the alternative is unbearable.
English
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About Michael Swanwick
Michael Swanwick (born November 18, 1950) is an American science fiction and fantasy author.
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Additional quotes by Michael Swanwick
The problem was that when all you're trying to do is survive, the universe seems a cold and hostile place. We needed a purpose. To distract us from our awareness of being a single spark of human warmth in an infinite expanse of silence. One small candle in the infinite night of being."
"Do you really think science is purpose enough?"
"Yes, I do. I always have. Maybe it's because I was a lonely kid, and there were times that learning things was all that kept me going. The search for truth is not an unworthy reason to keep going."
"You make it sound so arbitrary."
"Maybe it is. Yet I persist in believing that knowledge is better than ignorance.
The secret to successful scrying was to realize that the future was not fixed and there was no way of predicting it. None. All one could do was to identify what already existed unacknowledged. Lovers pledged themselves to each other long before their first kiss. Murder was implicit in friendship. A carcinoma that looked like a speck of dust on the X-ray spelled death. So much of what appeared to be random event was simply the working out of consequences.
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