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Michael Swanwick ist ein US-amerikanischer Fantasy- und Science-Fiction-Schriftsteller.

✵ 18. November 1950
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Michael Swanwick: Zitate auf Englisch

“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.”

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Michael Swanwick

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

“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.”

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Michael Swanwick buch Jack Faust

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

““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.””

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Michael Swanwick buch Stations of the Tide

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

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

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Michael Swanwick buch Jack Faust

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

“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.”

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Michael Swanwick buch Stations of the Tide

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

“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.”

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Michael Swanwick buch Jack Faust

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

“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.”

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Michael Swanwick buch The Iron Dragon's Daughter

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

“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.”

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Michael Swanwick buch Jack Faust

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

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

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Michael Swanwick buch Stations of the Tide

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

“I want your help to destroy the universe.”

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Michael Swanwick buch The Iron Dragon's Daughter

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

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

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Michael Swanwick buch Jack Faust

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

““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.””

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Michael Swanwick buch The Iron Dragon's Daughter

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

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

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Michael Swanwick buch Stations of the Tide

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

““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.””

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Michael Swanwick buch The Iron Dragon's Daughter

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

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

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Michael Swanwick buch Stations of the Tide

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

“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.”

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Michael Swanwick buch The Iron Dragon's Daughter

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

“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.””

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Michael Swanwick buch Jack Faust

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

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

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Michael Swanwick buch Jack Faust

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

““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.””

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Michael Swanwick buch Jack Faust

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

“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.”

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Michael Swanwick buch Stations of the Tide

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

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

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Michael Swanwick buch Jack Faust

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

““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.””

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Michael Swanwick buch Jack Faust

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

““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.””

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Michael Swanwick buch Stations of the Tide

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

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

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Michael Swanwick buch Jack Faust

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

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

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Michael Swanwick buch Stations of the Tide

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

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

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Michael Swanwick

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

““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.””

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Michael Swanwick buch Jack Faust

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

“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.”

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Michael Swanwick buch Stations of the Tide

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

““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.””

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Michael Swanwick buch The Iron Dragon's Daughter

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

““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.””

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Michael Swanwick buch The Iron Dragon's Daughter

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

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