The Urth of the New Sun

by Gene Wolfe

You’re a poet too, aren’t you? And a good liar, I bet.”

a neck so short that one had to take it on faith;

“Then you must know that all are scourged alike. And yet the nearer to success, the worse the pain each feels. That is a law we cannot change.”

The wind is rising now, blowing our new land, grain by grain, to the sunken Commonwealth;

well I can guess what this means....

AHA

hetrochthnous

Pain brought me to myself. Perhaps that is what pain is for, or perhaps it is only the chain forged to bind us to the eternal present, forged in a smithy we can but guess at, by a smith we do not know.

Now I was ready to strike at whoever sought to govern me, and if it were my fate that governed me, I would strike at that too.

Sidero nodded. “We will fight soon. Get away quickly.” That was, of course, what I had intended, but I could not do so now. To escape by my own cunning, in the face of danger and by my own will, was one thing—to be ordered away from the battle like a spado was quite another.

The most trivial skirmish is not trivial to those who die in it, and so should not be trivial in any ultimate sense to us.

??

Those who have never fought suppose that the deserter who flies the field is consumed by shame. He is not, or he would not desert; with only trifling exceptions, battles are fought by cowards afraid to run.

You must understand that when a truth is known, as that has been known by so many for so many aeons, it spreads abroad and changes its own shape, taking many forms.

I think it only fair to myself to say that I fled not so much from the sailors as from the faces of the others I had seen in the Chamber.

YA THINK???

They bring us through the pain we brought them through.

“I have deserved punishment often before, and not received it.”

Thus every common man who brings a son into the world must feel himself responsible for his woman’s labor and perhaps for her death, and with reason fears that the world will in the end condemn him with a million tongues.

extravagance is but a weak recommendation of truth.

“Yours is a race of pawns,” Tzadkiel told me. “You move forward only, unless we move you back to begin the game again. But not all the pieces on the board are pawns.”

I know myself often foolish and sometimes weak—lonely and frightened, too much inclined to passive good nature and all too ready, as I have said, to desert my closest friends in pursuit of some ideal. Yet I have terrified millions.

“What you believe makes a difference sometimes,” Gunnie said. “But not every time. That’s something I’ve learned here.

hmmm really?

I am a bad man trying to be a good one.”