Quotes from Michael Swanwick

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.

The television set groaned and wept blood when they turned it on.

when the down on the nape of her neck

the sad emptiness, upon slaying the villain who had brought madness upon his village, of learning that vengeance was not justice and that justice was to be had nowhere in the world;

delegation of hobs came out of the deep woods and, in a ceremony that dated back to the founding of the House, presented her with five blue jay feathers and a single perfect acorn. She repaid them with silver, bolts of jacquard silk, and as many of the best and largest flat screen television sets commercially available as they could carry back to their burrows in a day.

All prayers were dangerous. Either they were answered or they were not, and there was no telling which outcome would produce the greater regret. But they were necessary as well, for they suggested a way out of the unendurable present.

Doveva trovarsi sopra gli scavi archeologici, pensò. Un ottavo di miglio quadrato che era stato ancorato nella roccia sottostante con degli stabilizzatori dopo aver sepolto nel suo cuore almeno tre segnalatori di navigazione sigillati per impedire che la terra, in una nuova epoca, nascondesse di nuovo il tutto.

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

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

The bureaucrat fell from the sky.

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.

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.

My colleague and I are journalists. ... Not of the muckraking variety, I hasten to assure you! Corruption is a necessary and time-honored concomitant of any functioning government, which we support wholeheartedly.

You start by reading books, and you end by loving them

The privacy laws are paramount. They come before even common sense...

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

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.

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.

The body, you know, is ninety percent water, and there are those who will tell you that life is only a device which water employs to move itself about.

I forget if it was the Mathematician of Alexandria who said that geometry is beauty laid bare or the Father of Relativity who made the claim for physics," Darger said. "She is, in either case, ravishing.

Relationships between things shift and change constantly; there is not such thing as objective truth.

and he was young and joyful and in love and his sweetie was here with him, and she loved him, too. All the world was theirs and bright with possibility. So it couldn't last. Who the fuck cared?

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.

I once asked Fritz Leiber if it was not possible that Newhon, the world inhabited by his adventurers, was actually a horror venue, disguised by the fact that Fafhrd and Mouser, those most urbane of swordsmen, always escaped the consequences of their actions at the end of each story. To this he responded, "Everything I have ever written is horror.