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I was trapped in admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the captive of some long-vanished pine.
Day is brighter in my age.’
‘Wide as a stool, dense as a fool, and dished, as a rule.’
We, so the mages say, were apes once, happy apes in forests swallowed by deserts so long ago they have no names. Old men return to childish ways when at last the years becloud their minds. May it not be that mankind will return (as an old man does) to the decayed image of what once was, if at last the old sun dies and we are left scuffling over bones in the dark? I saw our future – one future at least – and I felt more sorrow for those who had triumphed in the dark battles than for those who had poured out their blood in that endless night.
with them ten thousand men and women; those who, in seeking a private resurrection, had rendered their corpses forever imperishable lay here like drunkards after their debauch, their crystal sarcophagi broken, their limbs relaxed in grotesque disarray, their clothing rotted or rotting, and their eyes blindly fixed upon the sky.
“They would not obey us, and the world is better without them anyway,” as the butcher’s wife told him when she cut away his manhood.
John Wayne Bobbitt.
servant of the Autarch – whose urine is the wine of his subjects
Tasty!
How like us those animals were, walking patiently they knew not where, their massive heads following thin strips of leather. Nine-tenths of life, so it seems to me, consists of these surrenders.
was it true that the ones who make sugar carried poisoned swords and would fight to defend it?
This sounds like someone who recalls a garbled account of the habits of bees.
You’re a monster too, do you know that, friend Severian? A monster because you take for your profession what most people only do as a hobby.’
Women believe – or at least often pretend to believe – that all our tenderness for them springs from desire; that we love them when we have not for a time enjoyed them, and dismiss them when we are sated, or to express it more precisely, exhausted. There is no truth in this idea, though it may be made to appear true. When we are rigid with desire, we are apt to pretend a great tenderness in the hope of satisfying that desire; but at no other time are we in fact so liable to treat women brutally, and so unlikely to feel any deep emotion but one.
