Lucius Shepard

“{{isfdb name|id=Lucius_Shepard|name=Lucius Shepard}}”

“Things Specialist Charles N. Wilson Wants You To Know · · · · · 1: Everything I've ever known has been no more than a powerful conviction. 2: Nothing motivates like sex and death and sound effects. 3: Politics is the Enemy. 4: Jesus and Mohammed would probably hang out together.”

“The outcry surrounding the public disclosure of the project had taken only three months to die, this—thought Jocundra—a telling commentary upon the spongelike capacity of the American consciousness to absorb miracles, digest them along with the ordinary whey provided by the media, and reduce them to half-remembered trivia.”

“Every object, the old man had said, is but an interpretation of every other object. There is no sure knowledge, only endless process.”

““An attic’s the afterlife of a house,” said Otille, opening the door. “Or so my mother used to say.””

“It was easy to see how one could think of the family as a single terrible creature stretching back through time, some genetic flaw or chemical magic binding the spirit to the blood.”

“The half moon sailed high, sharp-winged shadows skimming across it, and the conical hills and the vine-shrouded trees washed silver-green under the moonlight had the look of a decaying city millennia after a great catastrophe.”

“The necessary had been accomplished. That’s the way Les Invisibles work. Singular, unquantifiable events. Impossible to treat statistically, to define with theory.”

““And then along came Satan’s Eye Itself. Television.” He laughed, as at some fatal irony. “Don’t you hear the evil hum of the word, the knell of Satan? Television! It’s the ruling character of your lives, like the moon must have been for Indians. An oracle, a companion, a signal of the changing seasons. But rather than divine illumination, each night it spews forth Satan’s imagery. Murders, car crashes, mad policemen, perverted strangers! And you lie there decomposing in its flickering, blue-gray light, absorbing His horrid fantasies!””

“We uncovered new forces, we took a step along what may be an endless path toward divinity, we redirected the entire thrust of psychoanalytic theory, and, as with all knowledge, we found that deeper and more compelling mysteries yet lay beyond those we had reduced to the security of fact.”

“Manipulate? Yes, I manipulated. And despite the ensuing events, I would do so again, for it is the function of psychiatry to encourage the living to live.”

“I submit that all psychotherapy is manipulation; that as psychiatrists we do not heal people, but manipulate their neuroses into functional modes.”

“Doesn’t that sound like God to you? This big stupid, invulnerable thing that resembles us and whose creations are more intelligent than it is? The Bible left out that part, but it would explain a great deal.”

“That the official and the criminal are inextricably aligned should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the workings of their government, but nowhere is this juxtaposition so literal and apparent as in Mexico City.”

“Evil required no real genius, only power, lack of conscience, and an inquisitive nature such as I had seen at work in the tea forest. Men were, indeed, made in Its Image…at least writers and criminals were.”

“All journeys end in disappointment if for no other reason than that they end.”

“I yearned for that future. I wanted to live in the illusion that persuades us that true-life experience can be obtained on the Internet.”

“She went on to dismiss much of postmodernism as having “an overengineered archness” and, except for a few exemplary authors, being a refuge for those writers whose “disregard for traditional narrative (was) an attempt to disguise either their laziness or their inability to master it.””

“Depravity always incorporates obsession.”

“She’s sad because she’s drinking to be sad because she’s afraid that what she does not feel is actually a feeling. Typical post-modern Manhattan bullshit.”