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He mispronounced quite common words: urticate, salpinx, bordereau.
Nice flex Severian
It is said that it is the peculiar quality of time to conserve fact, and that it does so by rendering our past falsehoods true.
The question that occupied my mind most during those slow days was that of means. I had learned all the arts of the torturer; now I thought of them—sometimes one by one, as we had been taught them, sometimes all together in a revelation of pain.
I felt that we two might commit some act so atrocious that the world, seeing us, would find it irresistible.
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.
Love this one.
I have heard it said that one always feels a fool in them, whether they succeed or not, and surely I felt a fool in that one. And yet it was hardly a disguise at all.
I told her and her brother that I wished I knew more of religion. Both smiled, and the brother said, “If you mention it first, no one will want to talk about it.
So I became, in appearance at least, a pilgrim bound for some vague northern shrine. Have I said that time turns our lies into truths?
“But there is something more to you after all. You have the face of someone who stands to inherit two palatinates and an isle somewhere I never heard of, and the manners of a shoemaker, and when you say you’re not afraid to die, you think you mean it, and under that you believe you don’t. But you do, at the very bottom. It wouldn’t bother you a bit to chop off my head either, would it?”
“Nor do I believe that beautiful thoughts—or wise ones—are engendered by external troubles.” “I did not say beautiful thoughts, but thoughts of grace and greatness, though I suppose that is a kind of beauty. Let me show you.” She lifted my hand and slipping it inside her rags pressed it to her right breast. I could feel the nipple, as firm as a cherry, and the warmth of the gentle mound beneath it, delicate, feather-soft and alive with racing blood. “Now,” she said, “what are your thoughts? If I have made the external world sweet to you, aren’t they less than they were?”
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.
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.
Jolenta had been complaining to Dr. Talos because she had to walk.
Baldanders’s deep, dull voice came from behind us now. “I will carry you.” She glanced back at him. “What? On top of all the rest?” He did not reply. “When I say I want to ride, I don’t mean, as you seem to think, like a fool at a flogging.” In my imagination, I saw the giant’s sad nod. Jolenta was afraid of looking foolish, and what I am going to write now will sound foolish indeed, though it is true. You, my reader, may enjoy yourself at my expense. It struck me then how fortunate I was, and how fortunate I had been since leaving the Citadel. Dorcas I knew was my friend—more than a lover, a
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bending his mighty strength to whatever task the red-hair...
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It was with Thea that I had first fallen in love, worshipping her because she belonged to the man I had saved. Thecla I had loved, in the beginning, because she recalled Thea. Now (as autumn dies, and winter and spring, and summer comes again, the end of the year as it is its beginning) I loved Thea once more—because she recalled Thecla.
I have just paused to reread what I have written of it, and I see that I have failed utterly to convey the essence of the thing. Its spirit was that of sculpture. If some fallen angel had overheard my conversation with the green man, he might have contrived such an enigma to mock me.
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.
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 had boasted that she made tribadists of women. She came near to making an algophilist of me.
someone who gets pleasure from pain.
