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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“Far down the line, our hipparch raised his arm; Guasacht waved us forward and Erblon blew the charge, echoed to right and left—a bellowing note that seemed to have deep-mouthed bells in it.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“How do we realize they are more important? Quantitatively, because they are such an enormous portion of the word count. Sympathetically, because the narrator finds them so important. Aesthetically, because we would have set down these demanding and exasperating books hours ago if we did not enjoy the introspective speculations which dominate them. And experientially, for—just as a pornographer might, for flavor, interrupt a sex scene for a line or two of lovers chatting about history before resuming what the audience is really here for—both audience and author know what we are here for when a multipage discussion of the allegorized history of humanity’s relationship with its space empire past breaks off for two lines of minimalist sex scene before returning to the chiliads and stars.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“Every person, you see, is like a plant. There is a beautiful green part, often with flowers or fruit, that grows upward toward the sun, toward the Increate. There is also a dark part that grows away from it, tunneling where no light comes.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“It is no longer possible for us to carry out the ceremony, as once we did, wrapped in the shining belt of the galaxy; but to achieve the effect as nearly as possible, Urth’s attractive field was excluded from the basilica. It was a novel sensation for me, and though I was unafraid, I was reminded again of that night I spent among the mountains when I felt myself on the point of falling off the world—something I will undergo in sober earnest tomorrow. At times the ceiling seemed a floor, or (what was to me far more disturbing) a wall became the ceiling, so that one looked upward through its open windows to see a mountainside of grass that lifted itself forever into the sky. Startling as it was, this vision was no less true than that we commonly see. Each of us became a sun; the circling, ivory skulls were our planets. I said we had dispensed with music, yet that was not entirely true, for as they swung about us there came a faint, sweet humming and whistling, caused by the flow of air through their eye sockets and teeth; those in nearly circular orbits maintained an almost steady note, varying only slightly as they rotated on their axes; the songs of those in elliptical orbits waxed and waned, rising as they approached me, sinking to a moan as they receded. How foolish we are to see in those hollow eyes and marble calottes only death. How many friends are among them! The brown book, which I carried so far, the only one of the possessions I took from the Matachin Tower that still remains with me, was sewn and printed and composed by men and women with those bony faces; and we, engulfed by their voices, now on behalf of those who are the past, offered ourselves and the present to the fulgurant light of the New Sun.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“I had the feeling, which I have often had when talking with old people, that the words he said and the words I heard were quite different, that there was in his speech a hoard of hints, clues, and implications as invisible to me as his breath, as though Time were a species of white spirit who stood between us and with his trailing sleeves wiped away before I had heard it the greater part of all that was said.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“I believe rather that when I was alone I felt I had in some fashion lost my individuality; to the thrush and the rabbit I had been not Severian, but Man. The many people who like to be utterly alone, and particularly to be utterly alone in a wilderness, do so, I believe, because they enjoy playing that part. But I wanted to be a particular person again, and so I sought the mirror of other persons, which would show me that I was not as they were.”
― 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.”
― 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

“As I stared into the fire, it seemed more possible than I would have liked to believe that someday, perhaps after a blow on the head, perhaps for no discernible cause, my imagination and my reason might reverse their places—just as two friends who come every day to the same seats in some public garden might at last decide for novelty’s sake to exchange them. Then I would see as if in actuality all the phantoms of my mind, and only perceive in that tenuous way in which we behold our fears and ambitions the people and things of the real world.”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“You have no power over me, neither you nor they. I am not afraid of pain, or of death. There is only one living woman I desire,”
― Gene Wolfe, Sword & Citadel

“How shall the state be most vigorous? It shall be most vigorous when it is without conflict. How shall it be without conflict? When it is without disagreement. How shall disagreement be banished? By banishing the four causes of disagreement: lies, foolish talk, boastful talk, and talk which serves only to incite quarrels. How shall the four causes be banished? By speaking only Correct Thought.”
― 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