Sword & Citadel Quotes

“One of the easiest ways to dominate a man is to demand something he cannot supply.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“We choose--or choose not--to be alone when we decide whom we will accept as our fellows, and whom we will reject. Thus an eremite in a mountain is in company, because the birds and coneys, the initiates whose words live in his 'forest books,' and the winds--the messengers of the Increate--are his companions. Another man, living in the midst of millions, may be alone, because there are none but enemies and victims around him.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“You think whatever is wrong with you is contagious, then?'

She laughed again. 'Yes, but you have it already. You caught it from your mother. Death.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“It is beyond value, which means it is worthless.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“What struck me on the beach and it struck me indeed, so that I staggered as at a blow—was that if the Eternal Principle had rested in that curved thorn I had carried about my neck across so many leagues, and if it now rested in the new thorn (perhaps the same thorn) I had only now put there, then it might rest in anything, and in fact probably did rest in everything, in every thorn on every bush, in every drop of water in the sea. The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were sacred Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“I have noticed that in books this sort of stalemate never seems to occur; the authors are so anxious to move their stories forward (however wooden they may be, advancing like market carts with squeaking wheels that are never still, though they go only to dusty villages where the charm of the country is lost and the pleasures of the city will never be found) that there are no such misunderstandings, no refusals to negotiate. The assassin who holds a dagger to his victim's neck is eager to discuss the whole matter, and at any length the victim or the author may wish.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“Why should the Increate protect us from ourselves? We might protect ourselves from ourselves. It may be that he will help us only when we come to regret what we have done.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men—all are dead.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“We may force a dog, sometimes, to act like a man—to walk on his hind legs and wear a collar and so forth. But we shouldn’t and couldn’t force a man to act like a man. Did you ever want to fall asleep? When you weren’t sleepy or even tired?” He nodded. “That was because you wanted to put down the burden of being a boy, at least for a time. Sometimes I drink too much wine, and that is because for a while I would like to stop being a man. Sometimes people take their own lives for that reason. Did you know that?”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“An instant later I was unwilling. Some part of me treasured the privacy that not even Dorcas had entered. Deep inside the convolutions of my mind, in the embrace of the molecules, Thecla and I were twined together. For others—a dozen or a thousand, perhaps, if in absorbing the personality of the Autarch I was also to absorb those he had incorporated into himself—to come where we lay would be for the crowds of the bazaar to enter a bower. I clasped my heart’s companion to me, and felt myself clasped. I felt myself clasped, and clasped my heart’s companion to me.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“There is something in all of us that has always been dead,” I said. “If only because we know that eventually we will die. All of us except the smallest children.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“Even a man who courts a maid thinking he has no rivals has one, and that one is herself. She may give herself to him, but she may also choose to keep herself for herself. He has to convince her that she will be happier with him than by herself, and though men convince maids of that often, it isn't often true.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“[T]he very existence of such powers argues a counterforce. We call powers of the first kind dark, though they may use a species of deadly light... and we call those of the second kind bright, though I think that they may at times employ darkness, as a good man nevertheless draws the curtains of his bed to sleep. Yet there is truth to the talk of darkness and light, because it shows plainly that one implies the other. The tale I read to little Severian said that the universe was but a long word of the Increate's. We, then, are syllables of that word. But the speaking of any word is futile unless there are other words, words that are not spoken. If a beast has but one cry, the cry tells nothing; and even the wind has a multitude of voices, so that those who sit indoors may hear it and know if the weather is tumultuous or mild. The powers we call dark seem to me to be the words the Increate did not speak... and these words must be maintained in a quasi-existence, if the other word, the word spoken is to be distinguished. What is not said can be important - but what is said is more important... And if the seekers after dark things find them, may not the seekers after bright find them as well? And are they not more apt to hand their wisdom on?”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“You must know the story of how the race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away all the wild half of themselves to do so, so that they no longer cared for the taste of the pale wind, nor for love or lust, nor to make new songs nor to sing old ones, nor for any of the other animal things they believed they had brought with them out of the rain forests at the bottom of time—though in fact, so my uncle told me, those things brought them.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“One ought to drink, I think, when one is cheerful already. Otherwise nothing but more sorrow is poured into the cup.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“There have been many times when I have felt I have gone mad, for I have had many great adventures, and the greatest adventures are those that act most strongly upon our minds.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“And what of the dead? I own that I thought of myself, at times, almost as dead. Are they not locked below ground in chambers smaller than mine was, in their millions of millions? There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men—all are dead. Their bodies repose in caskets, in sarcophagi, beneath arches of rude stone, everywhere under the earth. Their spirits haunt our minds, ears pressed to the bones of our foreheads. Who can say how intently they listen as we speak, or for what word?”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“Then I stood alone at the edge of the sea I had longed for so often; but though I was alone, I found it cheering, and breathed the air that is like no other, and smiled to hear the soft song of the little waves. Land—Nessus, the House Absolute, and all the rest—lay to the east; west lay the sea; I walked north because I was reluctant to leave it too soon, and because Triskele had run in that direction, along the margin of the sea. There great Abaia might wallow with his women, yet the sea was older far, and wiser than he; we human beings, like all the life of the land, had come from the sea; and because we could not conquer it, it was ours always. The old, red sun rose on my right and touched the waves with his fading beauty, and I heard the calling of the sea birds, the innumerable birds.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“Once I saw torches with dancing flames of scarlet and radiant gold held by solemn apes. A man with the horns and muzzled face of a bull bent over me, a constellation sprung to life. I spoke to him and found myself telling him that I was unsure of the precise date of my birth, that if his benign spirit of meadow and unfeigning force had governed my life I thanked him for it; then remembered that I knew the date, that my father had given a ball for me each year until his death, that it fell under the Swan. He listened intently, turning his head to watch me from one brown eye.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“I drank the alzabo. I ate her flesh. And at first it was filthy, as you say, though I had loved her. She was in me, and I shared the life that had been hers, and yet she was dead. I could feel her rotting there. I had a wonderful dream of her on the first night; when I go back among my memories it is one of the things I treasure most. Afterward, there was something horrible, and sometimes I seemed to be dreaming while I was awake—that was the talking and staring you mentioned, I think. Now, and for a long time, she seems alive again, but inside me.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“Inside the silken tent, we knelt before a simple altar heaped with flowers. Ava prayed. I, knowing no prayers, spoke without sound to someone who seemed at times within me and at times, as the angel had said, infinitely remote.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“Abruptly the voice became the plaintive treble of the little girl. “I can climb. Do you think I won’t think to move the table over there under the hole? I, who can talk?” “You know yourself a beast, then.” The man’s voice came again. “We know we are within the beast, just as once we were within the cases of flesh the beast has devoured.” “And you would consent to its devouring your wife and your son, Becan?” “I would direct it. I do direct it. I want Casdoe and Severian to join us here, just as I joined Severa today. When the fire dies, you die too-joining us—and so shall they.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“I love you, but you are another death, a death that has stayed with me and befriended me as the old death in the lake did, but death all the same.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“The past stood at my shoulder, naked and defenseless as all dead things, as though it were time itself that had been laid open by the fall of the mountain.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“As children we have no appreciation of scenery because, having not yet stored similar scenes in our imagination, with their attendant emotions and circumstances, we perceive it without psychic depth. I now looked at the cloudcrowned summits with my”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“of all the good things in the world, the only ones humanity can claim for itself are stories and music;”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“True courtesy,” he continued, “earns the name. It is courtesy that is truthful. When the plebeian kneels to the monarch, he is offering his neck. He offers it because he knows his ruler can take it if he wishes. Common people like that say-or rather, they used to say, in older and better times—that I have no love of truth. But the truth is that it is precisely truth that I love, an open acknowledgment of fact.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“Since the time I had ridden Vodalus’s charger out of Saltus, I had supposed in my innocence that all mounts might be divided into two sorts: the highbred and swift, and the cold-blooded and slow. The better, I thought, ran with the graceful ease, almost, of a coursing cat; the worse moved so tardily that it hardly mattered how they did it. It used to be a maxim of one of Thecla’s tutors that all two-valued systems are false, and I discovered on that ride a new respect for him. My benefactor’s mount belonged to that third class (which I have since discovered is fairly extensive) comprising those animals that outrace the birds but seem to run with legs of iron upon a road of stone. Men have numberless advantages over women and for that”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel