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

by Gene Wolfe

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.

Or that the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become the better for it.”

The books I had carried to her became my university, she my oracle.

“I ought to hate you,” she said. I had to lean over her to catch the words. “It’s all right,” I said. “But I don’t. Not for your sake … if I hate my last friend, what would be left?”

“I am deserving of no gifts.” “That is so. But you must recall, Severian, that when a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment. The only true gifts are such as you now receive. I cannot forgive you for what you have done, but I cannot forget what you were.

“I believe you still. Your voice had truth in it. Yet you are laboring to betray me in some way. Tell me now that isn’t so. Tell me you are acting in my best interests, and nothing beyond.”

“You’re asking me to do for you, whom I have every reason to despise, what I wouldn’t do for Thecla, whom I loved almost more than my own life. No. I’m a fool, and if I was not one before, surely your darling sister has made one of me. But not such a fool as that.”

I knew you would die for me, and so I dared to hope that you would have chosen, if you could choose, to suffer for me too. Forgive me.

Oaths are only mere weak things of honor compared to the benefits we give to others, which are things of the spirit; let us once save another, and we are his for life.

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.”

The law was this: That for all who dwelt there, life held but two paths: they might rise among the wise and walk clad with hoods of myriad colors, or they must leave the city and go into the friendless world.

If you do not see sorrow in my eyes, it is only because it lies upon my heart.

For no man lives long when his dreams are dead.

“Is that what you want to protect me from—loneliness? I would welcome such protection.”