The Urth of the New Sun Quotes

“Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“You can’t order the waves to be silent, madame,” Baldanders told her. “They are coming, and they are bitter with salt.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“The best offense is a good defense, but a bad defense is offensive.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“Things opposite unite and appear to disappear. The potential for both remains. That is one of the greatest principles of the causes of things.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“The instruments you have are the right instruments for you, because you’ve been shaped by them. That’s another law.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“In childhood, one imagines that any door unopened may open upon a wonder, a place different from all the places one knows. That is because in childhood it has so often proved to be so; the child, knowing nothing of any place except his own, is astonished and delighted by novel sights that an adult would readily have anticipated.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“If you know anything of science, madame, you must know that water is but ice given energy.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“I waded out of the sea while loving it still, even as I had earlier dropped from the stars while loving them; and in truth there is no place in Briah that is not lovely when it no longer holds the threat of death, save for the places men have made so.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“How is it you speak? What sound is there here?” “You must listen to my voice,” she told me, “and not to my words. What do you hear?” I did as she had instructed me, and heard the silken sliding of the sheet, the whisper of our bodies, the breaking of the little waves, and the beating of my own heart. A hundred questions I had been ready to ask, and it had seemed to me that each of the hundred might bring the New Sun. Her lips brushed mine, and every question vanished, banished from my consciousness as if it had never been. Her hands, her lips, her eyes, the breasts I pressed—all wondrous; but there was more, perhaps the perfume of her hair. I felt that I breathed an endless night … . Lying upon my back, I entered Yesod. Or say, rather, Yesod closed about me. It was only then that I knew I had never been there. Stars in their billions spurted from me, fountains of suns, so that for an instant I felt I knew how universes are born. All folly. Reality displaced it, the kindling of the torch that whips shadows to their corners, and with them all the winged fays of fancy. There was something born between Yesod and Briah when I met with Apheta upon that divan in that circling room, something tiny yet immense that burned like a coal conveyed to the tongue by tongs. That something was myself.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“How terrible it is that we know our stories only when we have lived them!”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“The young king, bright with such gold as is not found in any mine, strode across the waves; and the glory of him was such that he who looked on it should never look upon another.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“I said he had called them because it was from his mind that we drew them, seeking those who hated him, or at least had reason to. The giant you saw might have mastered the Commonwealth, had Severian not defeated him. The blond woman could not forgive him for bringing her back from death.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“And then I saw it—not below, where I had looked, but over my head, a vast and noble curve stretching away to either side, with white cloud flying between ourselves and it, a world all speckled over with blue and green like the egg of a wild bird.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“For years I had known joy in nothing but victories, and now I felt myself a boy again. When I had wished to climb the Great Keep, it had never occurred to me that the Great Keep itself might wish to climb the sky; I knew better now. But this ship at least was climbing beyond the sky, and I wanted to climb with her.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night, Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to. Flight.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“the pomps and wonders with which we sovereigns cow poor, ignorant people.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“... pain … the chain forged to bind us to the eternal present, …”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“..., the kind of place where one finds objects that appear to have come from nowhere …”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“... if we went out the way we came in, you'd never find anything. It's too short.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“All these would be rationalizations—the thing itself was glorious.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“We say that a man is as brave as an atrox, or that a woman is as lovely as a red roe, as [she] was. But we lack any such term for loyalty, because nothing we know is truly loyal---or rather, because true loyalty is found only in the individual and not in the type. A son may be loyal to his father or a dog to its master, but most are not...perhaps we are unable to advance some paragon of loyalty to an apothegm only because loyalty (in the final analysis) is choice.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“Yours is a race of pawns,” Tzadkiel told me. “You move forward only, unless we move you back to begin the game again. But not all the pieces on the board are pawns.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

“Catch Catodon … cast out his conation.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun