To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of you hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Auguries of Innocence by William Blake
Memory follows memory, memory defeats memory; some things are banished only into the realms of our rich imaginings - but this does not mean that they do not or cannot or will not exist - they exist! They exist! The last Melnibonean thinks of his people's history and legends, and he tells his human friends some of what he knows and one day a human scribe will write these remembered words which will become in turn the foundation for whole cycles of myths, whole volumes of legend and superstition, so that a grain of a grain of prehuman memory is carried over ot us, blood to blood, life to life. And the cycles turn and spin and intersect at unpredictable points in an eternity of possibilities, paradoxes and conjunctions, and one tale feeds another and one anecdote provides others with entire epics. Thus we influence past, present and futrue and all their possibilities. Thus are we all responsible for one another, through all the myriad dimensions of time and space that make up the multivers...
p84 ,
The Revenge of the Rose by Michael Moorcock
-"But why a dandy?"
-"There are many ways of keeping one's distance from the world."
-"And many others to keep the world at a distance from oneself."
-"You appreciate my drift, Sir Knight. Self-knowledge, however, is not self-salvation. You and I have a fair way to go in that direction. You through action and I, coward that I am, through contemplation."
-"I believe that I lack the courage of profound self-examination."
p146,
The Warhound and the World's Pain by Michael Moorcock
-"So justice requires good luck before it can exist?"
-"
roblely, captain."
p143,
The Warhound and the World's Pain by Michael Moorcock
-"By telling a single lie to oneself or to another, by denying a single fact of the world as it has been created, one adds to the World's Pain. And pain, lady, creats pain. And one must not seek to become saint or sinner, God or Devil. One must seek to become human and to love the fact of one's humanity."
p209,
The Warhound and the World's Pain by Michael Moorcock
...of all 20th-century fantasy writers of any popularity, MM (Michael Moorcock) is the most profoundly and multifariously theatrical. Almost all his work can be seen - either implicitly or, as in the
Jerry Cornelius and related sequences, explicitly - as both reflecting and embodying the principles of the COMEDIA DELL'ARTE. The Multiverse is a parade. ... he almost singlehandedly created the UK brand of S&S (Sword and Sorcery). This accomplishment is now taken for granted, and MM's tone of voice has become the default manner in which S&S tales are properly told in the UK; young writers must either sound like MM or work hard not to.
p656-p657
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, John Clute and John Grant
