Michael Moorcock

“You look ahead.”

“I look around. Ahead’s here already.”

Technology is potential freedom from brutality.

“It’s like prostitution.”

“It’s a lot like prostitution, isn’t it?”

“You see nothing wrong…?”

“The customer’s always right.”

“And you have no,” she shuddered, “ethics?”

“I give the public what it wants, if that’s what you mean.”

“Entropy’s setting in. Or so they say.”

“Why should that be true?”

“It’s Time—it’s all used up.”

“This is metaphysical nonsense!”

“Very likely.”

The poor man has sacrificed himself for others, but he could not help resenting them from time to time.

“Perhaps I should not say so, but it occasionally crosses my mind to wonder why, in all the mystic cosmologies, even in some of the modern so-called parasciences, our own age is always described as the age of chaos and contention. A comment, my logical side argues, on why people turn to mysticism. The past age was always better.”

“Childhood is the happiest time of life except when you’re a child,” said Jerry.

“I understand you. True.”

Time to be moving; moves to be timing.

Every court must have its fool, every great ideal must attract some who are motivated only by self-interest.

Machine-devoured, all his hours were given o’er to that insidious circuitry, and old grew he, unnoticing, in the service of his engines.

“And is adventure and sensation all we should seek, Meliadus?”

“Aye—why not? All is chaos, there is no meaning to existence, there is only one advantage to living one’s life and that is to discover all the sensations the human mind and body is capable of feeling.”

“I think you serve a great purpose, Hawkmoon. I think your destiny is a noble one.”

Hawkmoon laughed. “And yet I do not pine for a noble destiny—merely a secure one.”

And then he pursed his lips in disgust. “Doubtless that was the result of supernatural interference with our brains! How I hate the supernatural!”