Michael Swanwick Quotes

But there was only so much temptation a man could resist without losing all respect for himself.

The bureaucrat fell from the sky.

Everybody needs a servant, excellent sir, whether they know it or not.

A few words before we attack," Surplus said. "I know that I can trust you all to be terrifying..."
"Yasss!" his mountain horse said.
"Be quiet, Buttercup. However, please remember to only knock down things that are not difficult to repair – porches are fine; pottery is not.

Purdom has created a major body of work. Thoughtful, humane, intelligent, extrapolative, involving, his stories are exactly the sort of thing our genre exists to make possible. If you don't like Tom Purdom, you don't like science fiction. Period.

Perfection is death,' Anastasia said. 'The world is imperfect, but if it weren't, who would love it?

Their business here was over then, and they all knew it; the magic moment had arrived when it was understood that nothing more would be established, discovered, or decided today. But the meeting, having once begun, must drag on for several long more hours before it could be ended. The engines of protocol had enormous inertial mass; once set in motion they took forever to grind to a stop.

Fire Orchid patted his cheek. Lucky for you, you don't need worry about love at all. Because you have a wife.

Between things shift and change constantly; there is no such thing as objective truth.

Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning

You see? Characters in books do not read books. Oh, they snap them shut when somebody enters a room, or fling them aside in disgust at what they fancy is said within, or hide their faces in one which they pretend to peruse while somebody else lectures them on matters they'd rather not confront. But they do not read them. 'Twould be recursive, rendering each book effectively infinite, so that no single one might be finished without reading them all. This is the infallible message of discovering on which side of the page you are on.

It almost sounds sensible when you say it," Prince First-Born Splendor said. "Even though I know better.

This book is dedicated to all good teachers everywhere, most particularly those of the William Levering School and Central High School in Philadelphia, to whom more is owed than can ever be repaid.

Art should be beautiful, not ugly. It should be uplifting and redemptive. Art reassures us that life is good and that, however bad things may look at the moment, everything works out for the best in the end.

The mechanism thus created periodically acts out post-modern notions of cosmology and then deconstructs itself. It has met with great admiration and no little puzzlement.

So that, logically, in the brief time allotted to us, we should be as kind to one another as is humanly possible and face the harsh facts of reality without fear or flinching.

This was the ultimate form of ostentation among technology freaks - to have a system so complete and sophisticated that nothing showed; no machines, no wires, no controls.