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by
Gene Wolfe
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December 31, 2019 - January 26, 2025
Just as all that appears imperishable tends toward its own destruction, those moments that at the time seem the most fleeting recreate themselves—
Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them.
The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.
“How big is a man’s life?” asked Ultan. “I have no way of knowing, but isn’t it larger than that?” “You see it from the beginning, and anticipate much. I, recollecting it from its termination, know how little there has been.
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.”
“Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.
Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?”
“Surely that’s not unusual. There must be thousands, and perhaps millions of people like me. People accustomed to death, who feel that the only part of their lives that really mattered is over.”
Perhaps when night closes our eyes there is less order than we believe.
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.
Like every man who feels himself likely to die, I would have been happy to know that I was taking part in some established tradition.
I think it is in this that we find the real difference between those women to whom if we are to remain men we must offer our lives, and those who (again—if we are to remain men) we must overpower and outwit if we can, and use as we never would a beast: that the second will never permit us to give them what we give the first.
“She’s the sort of woman who’s good at making puzzles for other people, but not at solving ones she didn’t make herself.
She’s the kind of woman people say thinks like a man, but those women don’t think like real men at all, in fact, they think less like real men than most women do. They just don’t think like women. The way they do think is hard to follow, but that doesn’t mean it’s clear, or deep.”
there was a madness in his dull eyes, a shadow of some half-suppressed concern that had worn itself out in the prison of his mind until all its eagerness was gone and only its energy remained.
“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.”
“Lords,” he said. “O lords and mistresses of creation, silken-capped, silken-haired women, and man commanding empires and the armies of the F-f-foemen of our Ph-ph-photosphere! Tower strong as stone is strong, strong as the o-o-oak that puts forth leaves new after the fire! And my master, dark master, death’s victory, viceroy over the n-night! Long I signed on the silver-sailed ships, the hundred-masted whose masts reached out to touch the st-st-stars, I, floating among their shining jibs with the Pleiades burning beyond the top-royal sp-sp-spar, but never have I seen ought like you!
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Whatever I possess I would give to become one of you, who complain every day of memories fading. My own do not. They remain always, and always as vivid as at their first impression, so that once summoned they carry me off spellbound.
If my memories of the past remain intact, perhaps it is only because the past exists only in memory.
That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
And in any case, the old, recalled emotions were too strong. I was trapped in admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the captive of some long-vanished pine.
I’ll say this—a woman sealed in the dark long enough can become something very strange,
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?
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.
before I go I’m going to tell you what all housewives sooner or later tell their husbands: ‘Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers.’”
Gold and silver do not alter, but their guardians can suffer metamorphoses stranger than those that turn grapes to wine and sand to pearls.”
“It is beyond value, which means it is worthless.
He had a slightly cynical detachment from mankind that suggested he had seen a great deal of the world.
At one instant we walked mutely together in what surely must have been the paradise the New Sun is said to open to all who, in their final moments, call upon him; and though the wise teach that it is closed to those who are their own executioners, yet I cannot but think that he who forgives so much must sometimes forgive that as well.
Somewhere among the swirling worlds I am so soon to explore, there lives a race like and yet unlike the human. They are no taller than we. Their bodies are like ours save that they are perfect, and that the standard to which they adhere is wholly alien to us. Like us they have eyes, a nose, a mouth; but they use these features (which are, as I have said, perfect) to express emotions we have never felt, so that for us to see their faces is to look upon some ancient and terrible alphabet of feeling, at once supremely important and utterly unintelligible.
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.
Every hill and tree and flower seemed to have been arranged by some master intelligence (which I have since learned is that of Father Inire) to form a breathtaking vision. The observer feels that he is at the center, that everything he sees has been directed toward the point at which he stands; but after he had walked a hundred paces, or a league, he finds himself at the center still; and every vision seems to convey some incommunicable truth, like one of the unutterable insights granted eremites.
She laughed, and something in the way she threw back her well-shaped head told me she had once been beautiful.
“I think I said yesterday that I was afraid I would go mad. I think perhaps I’m going sane, and that is as bad or worse.”
“My son, have no fear of disturbing me, now or ever, for there is nothing under Heaven that I should rather see than your face.
no man lives long when his dreams are dead.
“You asked me for a light for your candle, and I tried to give you the sun, and now you are burned. The fault was mine …
