On Blue's Waters Quotes

“She waits. For what I do not know. It may be for her worshippers to return again. Or for us to become her new worshippers, as we well may. Or perhaps merely for death. She shaped herself, I believe, a woman of the Vanished People so that they would love her. We are here now, and so she shaped for me a woman of my own race—a woman beside whom Chenille would stand like a child—who could sing and speak to me. Beneath it the old sea goddess waited, and was not of our human race, nor of the race of the Vanished People, whom I was to come to know. I once had a toy, a little wooden man in a blue coat who was moved by strings. When I played with him, I made him walk and bow, and spoke for him. I practiced until I thought myself very clever. One day I saw my mother holding the two sticks that held his strings, and my little wooden man saluting my youngest sister much more cleverly than I could have made him do it, and laughing with his head thrown back, then mourning with his face in his hands. I never spoke of it to my mother, but I was angry and ashamed. *”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“I have tried hard to punish myself for that, and certain other things. No more. Let the Outsider punish me; we deceive ourselves when we think that we can measure out justice to ourselves. I wanted to end my guilt. What was just about that? I should feel guilty. I deserve it.”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“There is a musical instrument, one that is in fact little more than a toy, that we in Viron used to call Molpe’s dulcimer. Strings are arranged in a certain way and drawn tight above a chamber of thin wood that swells the sound when they are strummed by the wind. Horn made several for his young siblings before we went into the tunnels; when I made them, I dreamed of making a better one someday, one constructed with all the knowledge and care that a great craftsman would bring to the task, a fitting tribute to Molpe. I have never built it, as you will have guessed already. I have the craft now, perhaps; but I have never had the musical knowledge the task would require, and I never will. If I had built it, it might have sounded something like that, because I would have made it sound as much like a human voice as I could; and if I were the great craftsman I once dreamed of becoming, I would have come very near—and yet not near enough. That is how it was with the Mother’s voice. It was lovely and uncanny, like Molpe’s dulcimer; and although it was not in truth very remote as well as I could judge, there was that in it that sounded very far away indeed. I have since thought that the distance was perhaps of time, that we heard a song on that warm, calm evening that was not merely hundreds but thousands of years old, sung as it had been sung when the Short Sun of Blue was yet young, and floating to us across that lonely sea with a pain of loss and longing that my poor words cannot express. No, not even if I could whisper them aloud to you of the future, and certainly not as I am constrained to speak to you now with Oreb’s laboring black wingfeather. Nor with a quill from any other bird that ever flew. *”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“Nothing moved except the white bird, which flew back and forth with a slow, sad motion that seemed so weary that every time two wings rose I felt that it was about to fall into the sea, and the Short Sun, which crept down to the empty horizon as remorselessly as every man creeps toward his grave.”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“The chief thing is to begin, after all—after which the chief thing is to finish.”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“You that read all of this in a year that I will never see will think me wretched, perhaps... But know this: The best and happiest of my hours you know nothing about. I have seen days like gold.”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“It is not well to spend one’s symbols improvidently.”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“This is what I least wished to write about last night, but I am going to try to write it down this evening. Once, as I lay there at the bottom of the pit, it seemed to me that a man with a long nose (a tall man or an immense spider) stood over me. I did not move or even open my eyes, knowing that if I did he would be gone. He touched my forehead with something he held, and the pit vanished. I was standing in Nettle’s kitchen. She was making soup, and I watched her add a whole plateful of chopped meat to her kettle and shake the fire. She turned and saw me, and we kissed and embraced. I explained to her that I was not really in her kitchen at all, that I lay at the bottom of a pit in a ruin of the Vanished People on an island far away, and that I was dying of thirst. “Oh,” Nettle said, “I’ll get you some water.” She went to the millstream and brought back a dipper of clean, cool water for me; but I could not drink. “Come with me,” I told her. “I’ll show you where I am, and when you give me your water there I’ll be able to drink it.” I took her hand (yes, Nettle my darling, I took your hard, hardworking little hand in mine) and tried to lead her back to the pit in which I lay. She stared at me then as if I were some horror from the grave, and screamed. I can never forget that scream. And I lay in the pit, as before. The Short Sun was burning gold. *”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“About the Maker you know?” I nodded and said that we called him the Outsider. “A good name for him that is. Outside him we keep, into our hearts we don’t let him come. “When everything he’s got made, he got to paint. First the water. Easy it is. Then the ground, all the rocks. A little harder it gets. Then sky and trees. Grass harder than you think it is, the little brush he had got to use, and paint so when the wind blows the color changes, and different colors for different kinds. Then dogs and greenbucks, all the different animals. Birds and flowers going to be tough they are. This he knows. So for the last them he leaves.” I”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“The plain shiprock walls, and the painted statue of Lord Pas (from which the paint was peeling) will remain with me until the day I die, always somewhat colored by the wonder I felt as a small boy at seeing a black cock struggling in the old man’s hands after he had cut its throat, its wings beating frantically, beating as if they might live after all, live somehow somewhere, if only they could spray the whole place with blood before they”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“The plain shiprock walls, and the painted statue of Lord Pas (from which the paint was peeling) will remain with me until the day I die, always somewhat colored by the wonder I felt as a small boy at seeing a black cock struggling in the old man’s hands after he had cut its throat, its wings beating frantically, beating as if they might live after all, live somehow somewhere, if only they could spray the whole place with blood before they failed. My”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“(For so many years I feared that he would try to murder me, but in the end it was I who would have murdered him. He may burn my book if he chooses.) Third,”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“He is the oldest of our sons, and although I loved him, I did not like him.”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“I have seldom found a lot to love about my fellow human beings, even when I liked them;”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“But love is the last need a group has, not the first. If it were the first, there could be no such groups. Justice is the first need, the mortar that binds together a village or a town, or even a city. Or the crew of a boat. No one would take part in any such thing if he did not believe that he would be treated fairly.”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“When you’re so young that things have changed very little during your lifetime, you suppose that they never will. It’s entirely natural, but it is a bad mistake and wrong even in the moral sense more often than not.”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“Who was, who could be, more broken, exiled, and despairing than Maytera Marble?”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

“So attached to [their lost city of Pajarocu] were and are they that they have refused to duplicate it here on any lesser scale, although duplicating it on its original scale is still far beyond their reach. What they have done instead is to duplicate its plan to perfection—without duplicating, or attempting to duplicate, its substance at all.

There are “streets” paved with grass and fern between “buildings” and “manteions” that are no more than clearings in the forest marked in ways that are, to our eyes, almost undetectable. When the adult citizens we sought to question were willing to talk to us, they talked of gateways, walls and statues that did not in fact exist— or at least, that did not exist here on Blue—and described them in as much detail as if they loomed before us, together with colossal images of Hierax, Tartaros, and the rest, called by outlandish sobriquets and the objects of strange, cruel veneration.

But when the streets are too badly fouled or the river rises, this phantom Pajarocu goes elsewhere, which I think an excellent idea. Our own Viron was built on the southern shore of Lake Limna; when the lake retreated, our people clung to the shiprock buildings that Pas had provided when they ought to have clung to the idea that he had provided instead, the idea of a city by the lake. Many (although certainly not all) of Viron’s troubles may ultimately have been due to this single mistaken choice.

Listen to me, Horn and Hide. Listen all you phantom readers. Buildings are temporary, ideas permanent.”
― Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters