Quotes from book
Nifft the Lean

Michael Shea

Nifft, a master thief, journeys to the Place of the Raging Dead, a virtual hell, in search of the Wizard's Key

Michael Shea photo

“For the past three years, young Wimfort had enjoyed so ample a competence from his parent, that he’d been able to buy his way deep into the mysteries of the arts of Power. He purchased no real understanding, of course, for that’s bought by the coin of toil and thought.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 3, “The Fishing of the Demon-Sea,” Chapter 3 (p. 116)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

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“I have in mind the notion that is so fashionable nowadays, namely that we live in a Dark Age where puny Science quails before many a dim Unknown on every hand. Surely this sort of facile pessimism dampens the energy of inquiry even as it leads to obscurantism—toward a despair of certainty which encourages us to embrace truths, half-truths, and the most extravagant falsehoods with a promiscuous lack of discrimination.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Prologue (pp. 8-9)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

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“We all thought you such a daring romantic then, and so outspoken about all us more conventional souls! Remember what you used to say about the world of business? All toadying and chicanery, lean purses fawning on fat ones for favors? Were those not the days? How far we wander from our youthful views!”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 1, Chapter 3 (p. 32)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

Michael Shea photo

“While it is foolish to deny the dark around us, it is futile to exaggerate it.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Prologue (p. 8)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

Michael Shea photo

“Can it be your spirit does not thrive? Can it be you’ve weighed your life of kissing arse and crouching before fat purses, and have found it wanting?”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 1, Chapter 9 (p. 65)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

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“Granting that our knowledge be limited, what can it profit us to traffic in lurid fantasies and errant imaginings? When—certainty failing us—we must speculate, let us recognize the difference between careful enumeration of reasonable hypotheses, and the reckless multiplication of bizarre conceptions.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Prologue (p. 9)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

Michael Shea photo

“The demons are not our ancestors—we are theirs. The greeds and lusts, the wealth of horrors here, are not the archetypes of our own—they are the derivatives, the dreadful perfectings of all the evil that men have spawned and nourished. Call Man a great, roasting beast, spitted and turning above the fire of his own unending cruelty. The things of this world then, and of those yet farther down, are the drippings of the tortured giant, Man.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 3, Chapter 12 (p. 181)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

Michael Shea photo

“By his twentieth year he was a thorough adept in all of what we may term the “carnival arts,” and already a widely traveled young man. From mastery of the mountebank’s larcenous skills to the study of outright felonious appropriation, and all its subsidiary sciences, proved but a short step for Nifft, who always credited his early “dramatic training” with his success as a thief, vowing it had given him a rare grasp of his trade’s fundamentals: lying, imposture and nimble movement.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Prologue (pp. 6-7)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

Michael Shea photo

“And you could see at a glance that Defalk was a simple man who wanted no more than to be brilliantly rich, admired, and unencumbered with work. His face said it so plainly: “I’m an excellent fellow. Isn’t such a life no more than my proper portion?””

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 1, Chapter 3 (p. 31)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

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“Good soldiers stay alive by being unsentimental and having a quick eye for the main chance.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 2, “The Pearls of the Vampire Queen,” Chapter 8 (p. 105)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

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“The great in Evil, and the great in [Goodness|Good]]—both leave an immortal residue.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 3, Chapter 12 (p. 181)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

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“Come on,” I said. “We have to try. The effort is utterly pointless, but inaction seems an even greater agony.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 3, Chapter 18 (p. 221)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

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“This is not genuine scholarship! Real research is a coming-to-grips with phenomena. This, as a transcription of the ocean’s infinitely various text, is a fraud, an egregious counterfeit, which patly reduces the Primary Sea’s endlessness to a cozy finitude, such as it pleased this puny entity to regard it, for he must have had but a feeble stomach for enterprise of a dark or difficult kind.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 3, Chapter 11 (p. 168)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

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“The boy was unquestionably a great natural talent, if not an outright genius, in the art of complaint—tirelessly inventive, and completely shameless in the matter of interpreting his dissatisfactions as someone else’s—anyone else’s—criminal failures to content him.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 3, Chapter 18 (p. 215)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

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“The essence of nightmare lies less in the simple experience of horrors than in the unpreventable fruition of horrors foreknown.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 3, Chapter 17 (p. 208)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

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“He’s here, of course, strictly through his own ambitious carelessness.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

“Prime flaws of youth, of course—but also its strengths, this carelessness and ambition.”
Part 3, Chapter 14 (p. 191)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

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“You realize of course, Barnar, that it is simply not possible that we’re actually doing this?”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

“I’ve come to the same comforting conclusion, old friend. Therefore let’s away—an impossibility can only do us an unreal sort of harm, after all.”
Part 3, Chapter 8 (p. 139)
Nifft the Lean (1982)