"Money can always be traced. It leaves a trail of slime behind it wherever it goes."

Michael Swanwick Literature See all quotes by Michael Swanwick →

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“The authority of superior knowledge was different in kind from the authority of assumed power. Still, he felt a little awkward assuming it.”

“The universe has backed you into another corner—you can kill or die. There are no other choices. Doesn’t that make you angry? Doesn’t it make you want revenge? Or are you going to truckle to Dame Fate one more time, to be crushed and for all I know resurrected to run the maze of torment again and yet again? Stand up on your hind legs for once!”

“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.”

“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.”

“For all that she’d had no great expectations for it, sex was turning out to be even more squalid, tawdry, and cynical than she had suspected it would.”

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

Resonant Thoughts

"It is sad and painful to see how even our great Neospinozists Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel are far from abiding always by it and frequently try to show that they surpass Spinoza. In their times many p…"

— Baruch Spinoza

Philosophy1632–1677

#time

"To see life steadily, and see it whole, as a creature of the deep sees it, from below. Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any …"

— Nelson Algren

Literature1909–1981

#life

"It is not always obvious that metaphor has played this all-important function. But this is because the concrete metaphiers become hidden in phonemic change, leaving the words to exist on their own. Ev…"

— Julian Jaynes

Psychology1920–1997

#change

"There is an unearthly, mystical element in Friedman's thought. The mere existence of a stock of money somehow promotes expenditure. But insofar as he offers an intelligible theory, it is made up of el…"

— Joan Robinson

Economics1903–1983

#life