Michael Shea quotes

It is a bitter thing that each of us must finally be blown out like a candle, and have the unique ardor of his individual flame choked off, and sucked utterly away like smoke in the dark. Do we ever accept this in our hearts, any of us? The waste of knowledge! It never ceases to be...infuriating. (Michael Shea)
Present action, though futile, is preferable to passive acceptance of such a fate as awaits us.
Michael Shea
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
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
I will be succinct, eschewing vainglorious hyperbole.
Michael Shea
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
While it is foolish to deny the dark around us, it is futile to exaggerate it.
Michael Shea
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
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
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
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)
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
Good soldiers stay alive by being unsentimental and having a quick eye for the main chance.
Michael Shea
The great in Evil, and the great in [Goodness|Good]]-both leave an immortal residue.
Michael Shea
Come on,” I said. "We have to try. The effort is utterly pointless, but inaction seems an even greater agony.
Michael Shea
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
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
The essence of nightmare lies less in the simple experience of horrors than in the unpreventable fruition of horrors foreknown.
Michael Shea
He's here, of course, strictly through his own ambitious carelessness.
Michael Shea
You realize of course, Barnar, that it is simply not possible that we're actually doing this?
Michael Shea
Now a true ocean is the sky's open floor-that's the feeling men love in it, the reason they venture upon it, apart from gain or exploration. (Michael Shea)
We're none of us more than wisps of desire and imagining! What man is not, at the center of his mind, a ghostly wish-to-be haunting the jerry-built habitation of his imperfect acts? Haunting the maze of what-has-been?
Michael Shea
It was more than sad, the eternal unteachability of youth.
Michael Shea
But ah! what a drear hell it was we now had to venture through! What a maelstrom of relentless gorging, one creature upon another! The claws and jaws of the upper world are red enough-who denies it?-but the carnage has intermissions, periods of amiable association, zones of green peace and fructification. In the subworlds, the merciless seethe of appetites never simmers down.
Michael Shea
It's always been an exceedingly curious thing to me, just how incurious most people are about all save their own little island of time and place in the world.
Michael Shea