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.”

“Weigh then your wealth, and judge if it’s more dearTo you than life. If not, your course is clear.”

“Freedom! That belabored word! It is a big, empty word, and yet, when some experience reminds us what freedom is, how clear and particular its meaning becomes, how unspeakably sweet, and full!”

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

“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.”

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

“It was more than sad, the eternal unteachability of youth.”

“Rage and wounded pride look painful on a young face. Sixteen is a difficult age to get on with. There’s much to like—the freshness, the force of conviction. But there is also a certain arrogance, an inevitable concomitant of development, perhaps, which one must always struggle to forgive.”

“Ambitious dabblers in sorcery add much to the hell that is on earth.”

““He’s here, of course, strictly through his own ambitious carelessness.”“Prime flaws of youth, of course—but also its strengths, this carelessness and ambition.””

“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.”

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

“Deeper and deeper. Ever greater power. Ever greater evil.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The assumption that we would ever be called upon to perform this second task now appeared quite clearly to me as the most extravagant folly, based on a wild delusion conceived by a raving idiot.”

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

“At that age you invent extravagant compensations for bruises to your dignity.”