Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun, #1-2)

by Gene Wolfe

To retain puzzle pieces that don’t connect, dropped without context, is a skill that not all have. All had it once: it is how children read, every book, poster, and headline a stream of unknown terms, far too many to ask about them all, but the child retains them, trusting that they will connect to something someday. Kids collect Earth’s puzzle pieces every time they read, but as we move to grown-up books they all use the same picture, and define immediately those terms they fear a reader may not know. Thus the skill of keeping puzzle pieces fades, unless we read books set in other worlds, new puzzle pictures which make us retain the skill, as frogs sometimes retain their tadpole tails into adulthood. This—many have observed—is why most F&SF readers come to the genre young, it’s hard to start in adulthood when one’s puzzle-memory skill has sat atrophied.

In the end I looked, having drained the dregs of pleasant dread.

He who had given all books into my keeping made me blind so that I should know in whose keeping the keepers stand.”

The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say, “I will,” and “I will not,” and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.

By the use of the language of sorrow I had for the time being obliterated my sorrow—so powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.

“If we could have our way, no man would have to go roving or draw blood. But women did not make the world. All of you are torturers, one way or another.”

A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart.

But I believe there is no other difference between those who are called courageous and those who are branded craven than that the second are fearful before the danger and the first after it.

One who truly benefits another is for a moment at a level with the Pancreator, and in gratitude for that elevation will serve the other all his days; and so I told Vodalus.

We are but dreams, and dreams possess no life by their own right. See, I am wounded. (Holds out his hand.) When my wound heals, it will be gone. Should it with its bloody lips say it is sorry to heal?