Michael Swanwick Quotes

“A tension went out of the air. 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.”

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 22 (p. 399)

“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.”

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 8, “Conversations in the Puzzle Palace” (p. 141)

“Her life was a complete mess, true, but it could be straightened out. All it would take was money. Money could straighten out anything, if you had enough of it.”

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 13 (p. 222)

““Let me explain to you,” the Horned One said, “the nature of history.”
“What?”
“The first thing you need to know is that history happens almost exclusively in the dark… Here is your second lesson: History is that which cannot be prevented… Here is your third and final lesson: History is simply life with all the bits any sane person might care to experience left out.””

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 16 (p. 288)

“For a long time the Baldwynn did not speak. At last he said, “Will you serve the Goddess now? Knowingly and lovingly, in sweet obedience and humble acknowledgment of all that she is?”
“No.” The word was a pebble in her mouth. She spat it out. “Not now, not tomorrow, not if I live to be a million. Never.”
The Baldwynn stopped and took her hands in his. “Dear child,” he said. “I feared there was no hope for you.””

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 14, “Dreadnought” (pp. 246-256; extracts from a long narrative passage)

““It was none of your foul science. I am an occultist.”
“A distinction in terminology only. Our means may differ, but we employ identical techniques. First, render the brain open to suggestion. We use magnetic resonance, while you employ drugs, ritual, sex, terror, or some combination thereof. Then, when the brain is susceptible, imprint it with new behavior patterns. We use holotherapeutic viruses as the message carriers; you eat a rat. Finally, reinforce the new pattern in your daily life. Our methods are probably identical there. The skill is extremely old; people were being reprogrammed long before machines.””

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 23 (p. 418)

Michael Swanwick Quotes about life

““You are still infested with hope. You think there is a life worth living somewhere, and that some combination of action, restraint, knowledge, and luck will save you, if only you can get the mix right. Well, I’ve got news for you. Right here, right now—this is as good as it gets.”
“Things will get better!”
“Have they ever?” The dragon’s contempt was palpable. The cabin hatch hissed open. “Go. Return to your dormitory room and enjoy your present. Come back when you’ve grown large enough to look upon futility without flinching. Come back when you’ve despaired and moved beyond despair to vengefulness. Come back when you’ve decided to stop lying to yourself.””

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 13, “A View from a Height” (p. 235)

““Tell me! What do you think of life? What do you think of ambition? What do you think of science, of learning, of love, of fame, of glory, of aspiration?”
“I think… that those are all very different things.”
“You are wrong. They are all one thing—a cunt.”
“Sir?”
“A cunt! Consider: The cunt is a nasty, ugly, filthy thing. Yet we desire it so greatly as to be willing to suffer any indignity to attain it. For the sake of it we labor and preen and whisper sugary words. We go to the theatre with flowers in our arms, climb over back walls by moonlight, write sonnets, jump out of windows with our trousers in our hands, give dangerous men their choice of weapons. We build love-nests for it sake, and cities, and civilizations. It is our all, our only, our ideal. It has created us and made us great. Such is life, such is ambition, such is science, learning, love, fame, glory, and aspiration. The Eternal Cunt,” he said significantly, “draws us onward.””

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 17 (p. 304)

“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.”

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 16, “The Wild Hunt” (p. 276)

““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.””

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 19, “Ashes” (p. 330)

“Urban life was thus founded upon the principle of deliberately confounding those who were not a part of it. Civilization was a strategy of exclusion.”

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 19 (pp. 339-340)

“Writing is a matter of finding the appropriate balance of dinosaurs and sodomy.”

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 16, “The Wild Hunt” (p. 287)

Michael Swanwick: Trending quotes

““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.”

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

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 19, “Ashes” (pp. 327-328)

“I’ll have to throw it at him, Rebel thought. Swing it up, catch him under the jaw, break a few teeth. Then grab the knife and hold him for the security people. That was a good plan. It ranked right up there with suddenly learning how to teleport.”

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 19, “Ashes” (p. 328)

Michael Swanwick Quotes

Michael Swanwick book Vacuum Flowers

Source: Vacuum Flowers (1987), Chapter 5, “People's Sheraton” (pp. 74-75)

“The bureaucrat was sensitive to this kind of friction. It arose wherever the moving edge of technology control touched on local pride.”

“He stood unmoving, wondering at his own abrupt and incomprehensible inability to act. He did not fear damnation. Nor did he give a fig for the common opinion of Mankind. There was nothing to stop him but fear alone—fear that his reasoning was wrong.”

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 1, “The Leviathan in Flight” (p. 14)

““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?””

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 1, “Trinity” (p. 17)

““I can’t figure you out.”
“You’re not supposed to.””

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 4, “Flight” (pp. 59-60)

““Your collection is not a woman. That’s only a metaphor—an abstraction! You’ll be dying for nothing, for a principle that nobody else can even comprehend.”
As she spoke, Jane became convinced that she herself would never willingly die for a principle. She might feel guilty about it, but she’d smile and lie, knuckle under, pretend, anything, in order to survive. It made her feel a little sad to realize this, but also, at the same time, very adult.”

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 13 (p. 220)

“There was so much going on, and so little he cared to know about!”

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 15 (p. 263)

“We had ambition, and ascended into Hell.”

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 11, “Apes” (p. 184)

Michael Swanwick book Vacuum Flowers

Source: Vacuum Flowers (1987), Chapter 14, “Girlchild” (p. 224)

““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.””

“I’m a politician. I agree with the majority of whoever I happen to be with at the moment.”

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 7 (p. 101)

“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.”

Source: In the Drift (1985), Chapter 5, “Marrow Death” (p. 151)

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

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 10, “The Sermon” (pp. 165-166)

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

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 21 (p. 378)

“Oh, Sirin, how could you? You know as well as I do how dangerous scrying the future can be. Half the time what it shows you wouldn’t happen if you hadn’t foreseen it.”

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 6, “Practical Designs” (p. 80)

“Still, it was no easy thing to flirt in German.”

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 16 (p. 277)

““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.””

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 13, “Tabloids” (p. 225)

““How… how can”—savagely, he slashed an arm down before him in absolute negation of all he saw—“such be? How could God allow it?”
“God? You fool—there is no God!”
The words struck Faust like a great bronze clapper, shattering the crusted certainties of a lifetime, reverberating, setting up echoes that washed back and forth through his being in slowly lessening waves, leaving no atom unshaken, no belief untouched. There was no God. He knew this for the truth, recognized it as such on an almost physical level, for it summed up everything he had ever thought or reasoned. It resolved a thousand doubts. It left no question unanswered. There was no God! Everything was possible now. Nothing was forbidden.”

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 10 (pp. 168-169)

“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.”

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 2, “Revelations” (pp. 30-31)

““Are you ready?” Jane asked.
“Before I existed, I was ready.””

Source: In the Drift (1985), Chapter 5, “Marrow Death” (pp. 180-181)

“Tyranny always has its rationale.”

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 22 (p. 394)

“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.”

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 2, “Witch Cults of Whitemarsh” (p. 26)

“So it was that the Catherines poured water and spooned gruel, while the Clares prayed for the intercession of the saints. The Catherines changed sheets. The Clares practiced mortification of the flesh. The Catherines employed antibiotics. The Clares made a public display of a kneecap of their patron saint.
It was soon widely know to which hospital one went to get well, and to which one went to die.”

Source: In the Drift (1985), Chapter 4, “Mutagen Fair” (p. 130)

““I am playing a game called Futility,” she said. Are you familiar with it?
“How does one win?”
“You don’t. You can only postpone losing. I’ve managed to keep this particular game going for years.””

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 9, “The Plague Kitchen” (p. 141)

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

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 3, “The Dance of the Inheritors” (p. 46)

“The announcers sounded giddily excited. Their faces flushed, their eyes bright. Natural disasters did that to people, made them feel significant, reassured them that their actions mattered.”

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 9, “The Plague Kitchen” (p. 148)

“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.”

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 12, “Across the Ancient Causeway” (p. 223)

“Meanwhile, the Wheel turns. The humble are exalted and the mighty are humbled. The best are inevitably defeated, and the scum always rises to the top. Here is the source of all the world’s pain, that restless turning, ever accelerating, always bringing us around again to where we were before, but older, changed, scarred, and sorrowful. Had I only known the identity of the whisperer, I would never have listened. The Wheel would not have been set in motion.”

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 19, “Ashes” (p. 320)

“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.”

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 13 (p. 232)

“Be grateful. I’ve taught you a valuable lesson. Most people never do learn exactly how much they will do to stay alive.”

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 19, “Ashes” (p. 317)

“I want your help to destroy the universe.”

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 13, “A View from a Height” (p. 232)

“The hearsay of hearsay is not admissible as scholarship.”

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 19 (p. 340)

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

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 1, “Trinity” (p. 11)

““You ask a question that cannot be answered without knowing the nature of the primal chaos from which being arose. Is Spiral Castle like a crystal, once shattered, forever destroyed? That is what I prefer to believe. Or is it like a still pond, whose mirrored surface may be shattered and churned, but which will inevitably restore itself as the waves die down? You may believe this if you choose. You can even believe—why not?—that the restored universe will be an improvement on the old. For me, so long as I have my vengeance I care not what comes after.”
“And us?”
“We die.” An involuntary rise in the dragon’s voice, a slight quickening of cadence, told her that she had touched upon some unclean hunger akin to but less seemly than battle-lust. “We die beyond any chance of rebirth. You and I and all we have known will cease to be. The worlds that gave us birth, the creatures that shaped us—all will be unmade. So comprehensive will be their destruction that even their pasts will die with them. It is an extinction beyond death that we court. Though the ages stretch empty and desolate into infinity and beyond, there will be none to remember us, nor any to mourn. Our joys, sorrows, struggles, will never have been.
“And even if there is a universe to come, it will know naught of us.””

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 7, “Who Is the Black Beast?” (p. 119)

“You don’t hide information by destroying it. You hide it by swamping it with bad information.”

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 19 (pp. 340-341)

“Hierarchies only work to the benefit of those on the top. If you’re high, you’ll get by. If you’re low, out you go! That’s how it is.”

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 8, “Conversations in the Puzzle Palace” (p. 139)

“Faust wallowed heavily over on his side, presenting a pitiable face to Wagner. “Never fall in love,” he said. “She will take lovers, and some of them will be more experienced and capable than you. I tell you this as a friend—there are dishes once tasted, a woman is loath to do without.””

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 12 (p. 209)

“They were not aware of the madness that lurked within their own minds.”

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 16, “The Wild Hunt” (p. 275)

““Now why on Earth would you tell him a thing like that?”
“Because it’s true.”
Sbrulius laughed. “That, dear Faust, is the single worst argument you could have raised. Many things are true. Few are proper. Fewer still are desirable.””

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 1, “Trinity” (p. 3)

“I would appreciate it if just this once you would make the effort to curb your negativism.”
“I have to say what I think. That’s what I’m being paid for, after all.”

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 4, “Flight” (p. 55)

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

“A very common delusion.”
Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 1, “The Leviathan in Flight” (p. 10)

““Good men are dying at this very moment to protect you, your factories, your possessions, and all civilization.”
“Good men are dying every moment,” Gretchen replied coldly, “somewhere. Since they did not ask my leave to do so, I feel no particular obligation toward them.””

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 13, “Tabloids” (p. 214)

““Out of doors on a moonless night?” Mette sneered. “Only fools, footpads, and astrologers stray where there is no light.””

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 13, “Tabloids” (p. 219)

“Everyone dies—the rearrangement of when is a matter of only statistical interest.”

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 4, “Flight” (p. 57)

“These hands were almost crippled digging coal so that rich men in Boston might grow even richer.”

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 13, “A View from a Height” (p. 238)

“I trust I have not grown so gullible as to consult a doctor,” the bureaucrat said with dignity. “If I want medical attention, I hall employ the qualified machinery or, in extremis, a human with proper biomedical augmentation. But I will not swill down fermented swamp guzzle at the behest of some quasi-literate, uneducated charlatan.”

Source: In the Drift (1985), Chapter 4, “Mutagen Fair” (p. 130)

““Excuse me,” she said hesitantly, “but what effect do these minor planets have on our behavior and fortunes? I mean, you know, astrological influence?”
He looked at her. “None.”
“None at all.”
“No.”
“But if the planets affect our fortunes—” She stumbled to a stop at the dispassionately scornful look on the pale man’s face, the slow way he shook his head. “Surely you’ll agree that the planets order and control our destinies?”
“They do not.”
“Not at all?”
“Then what does? Control our destinies, I mean.”
“The only external forces that have any influence on us are those we can see every day: the smile, the frown, the fist, the brick wall. What you call ‘destiny’ is merely a semantic fallacy, the attribution of purpose to blind causality. Insofar as any of us are compelled to resist the flow of random events, we are driven solely by internal drives and forces.””

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 7, “Who Is the Black Beast?” (p. 108)

““So whose side are you on? You have to choose.”
“I’m not going to be on anybody’s side anymore,” she said. “Sides are stupid.””

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 6 (p. 88)

“There are three stages to a battle: First you’re bored. Then you’re terrified. Then you’re dead. Each is necessary, and they must all come in the proper order.”

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 4 (p. 56)

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

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 14, “Dreadnought” (pp. 248-249)

“Sam stood in the center of the church, listening for the presence of God. It was a hot place. The air was blue with floating radioisotopes. She glanced up at the clouds and they staggered by as if the walls were falling in on her. She looked away quickly. The air flowed around her, calm and peaceful and blue. But there was no divine presence.”

Source: In the Drift (1985), Chapter 1, “Mummer Kiss” (p. 4)