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?"

"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. I…"

"Those feats of deep cunning and brave flair—we’re all allotted a few of them, and we get no more, no matter what our longing is. And you know, you’re lucky if you even recognize when you’re having you…"

"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 a…"

"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 …"

"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 t…"

"Present action, though futile, is preferable to passive acceptance of such a fate as awaits us."

"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 underst…"