|
a40180c
|
And it came to me that these trees had been hardly smaller when I was yet unborn, and had stood as they stood now when I was a child playing among the cypresses and peaceful tombs of our necropolis, and that they would stand yet, drinking in the last light of the dying sun, even as now, when I had been dead as long as those who rested there.
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
a32da56
|
She was staring at the low ceiling, and I had the feeling that there was another Severian there, the kind and even noble Severian who existed only in Dorcas's mind. All of us, I suppose, when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
a7d7396
|
We talk of strong personalities, and they are strong, until the not-every-day when we see them as we might see one woman alone in a desert, and know that all the strength we thought we knew was only courage, only her lone song echoing among the stones; and then at last when we have understood this and made up our minds to hear the song and admire its courage and its sweetness, we wait for the next note and it does not come. The last word, w..
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
1ca28c1
|
It is beyond value, which means it is worthless.
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
dde181a
|
If I had seen one miracle fail, I had witnessed another; and even a seemingly purposeless miracle is an inexhaustible source of hope, because it proves to us that since we do not understand everything, our defeats--so much more numerous than our few and empty victories--may be equally specious.
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
d76faf6
|
And it came to me that these trees had been hardly smaller when I was yet unborn, and had stood as they stood now when I was a child playing among the cypresses and peaceful tombs of our necropolis, and that they would stand yet, drinking in the light of the dying sun, even as now, when I had been dead as long as those who rested there. I saw how little it weighed on the scale of things whether I lived or died, though my life was precious t..
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
be6017a
|
I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure, in time, until I spent most of my hours searching for such books. Then I devised a plan of study for myself, tracing obscure sciences, one after another, from the dawn of knowledge to the present. Eventually I exhausted even that, and beginning at the great ebony case that stands in the center of the room we of the library have maintaine..
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
adaa513
|
All love that which they destroy.
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
adb78eb
|
But I believe there is no difference between those who are called courageous and those who are branded craven than that the second are fearful before the danger and the first after it. The coward is a coward, then, because he has brought his fear with him; persons we think cowardly will sometimes amaze us by their bravery, if they have had no forewarning of their danger.
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
cd710a0
|
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.
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
407f307
|
Dorcas belonged, as I now realize, to that vast group of women (which may, indeed, include all women) who betray us--and to that special type who betray us not for some present rival but for their own pasts.
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
69b4bf6
|
Just when I despaired -- she was there, filling me as a melody fills a cottage. I was with her, running beside the Acis when we were a child. I knew the ancient villa moated by a dark lake, the view through the dusty windows of the belvedere, and the secret space in the odd angle between two rooms where we sat at noon to read by candlelight. I knew the life of the Autarch's court, where poison waited in a diamond cup. I learned what it was ..
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
062097e
|
Master Palaemon's hand, dry and wrinkled as a mummy's, groped until it found mine. "Among the initiates of religion it is said, 'You are an epopt always.' The reference is not only to knowledge but to their chrism, whose mark, being invisible, is ineradicable. You know our chrism." I nodded again. "Less even than theirs can it be washed away. Should you leave now, men will only say, 'He was nurtured by the torturers.' But when you have been..
|
|
past
education
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
96eb13c
|
Each of us finds his way, his place; we rattle around the universe until everything fits; this is life; this is science, or something better than science.
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
c4ac77c
|
Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them.
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
bd8fe12
|
Seeing him brought in, has, I think, saved me from losing my mind; for that I do not thank him-sanity, after all is only reason applied to human affairs, and when this reason, applied over years, has resulted in disaster, destruction, despair, misery, starvation, and rot, the mind is correct to abandon it. This decision to discard reason, I see now, is not the last but the first reasonable act; and this insanity we are taught to fear consis..
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
da3807c
|
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 thor..
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
c108817
|
I am deserving of no gifts." "That is so. But you must recall, Severian, that when a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but payment."
|
|
deserving
gene-wolfe
generosity
gifts
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
25bb5b3
|
There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume work from a short story, a novel, or a series. The ending of the final volume should leave the reader with the feeling that he has gone through the defining circumstances of Main Character's life. The leading character in a series can wander off into another book and a new adventure better even than this one. Main Character cannot, at the end of your multivolume work. (Or..
|
|
writing
protagonist
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
9d1492e
|
Just as summer-killed meat draws flies, so the court draws spurious sages, philosophists, and acosmists who remain there as long as their purses and their wits will maintain them, in the hope (at first) of an appointment from the Autarch and (later) of obtaining a tutorial position in some exalted family. At sixteen or so, Thecla was attracted, as I think young women often are, to their lectures on theogony, thodicy, and the like, and I rec..
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
7ac1e01
|
It has been remarked thousands of times that Christ died under torture. Many of us have read so often that he was a "humble carpenter" that we feel a little surge of nausea on seeing the words yet again. But no one ever seems to notice that the instruments of torture were wood, nails, and a hammer; that the man who built the cross was undoubtedly a carpenter too; that the man who hammered in the nails was as much a carpenter as a soldier, a..
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
ac4c7ca
|
Whatever we may say, all of us suffer from disturbed sleep at times. Some in truth hardly sleep, though some who sleep copiously swear that they do not. Some are disquieted by incessant dreams, and a fortunate few are visited often by dreams of delightful character. Some will say that they were at one time troubled in sleeping but have 'recovered' from it, as though awareness were a disease, as perhaps it is.
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
cf7dd38
|
The brown book I carry says there is nothing stranger than to explore a city wholly different from all those one knows, since to do so is to explore a second and unsuspected self. I have found a thing stranger: to explore such a city only after one has lived in it for some time without learning anything of it.
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
84b6a00
|
The picture he was cleaning showed an armored figure standing in a desolate landscape. It had no weapon, but held a staff bearing a strange, stiff banner. The visor of this figure's helmet was entirely of gold, without eye slits or ventilation; in its polished surface the deathly desert could be seen in reflection, and nothing more.
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
26db88f
|
It is well, I think, for us to learn to tell evil from good; but it has its price, as everything does. We leave our evil friend behind.
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
c44cc75
|
I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe--but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual; so it may be that some of ..
|
|
memories
unreliable-narrator
memory
|
Gene Wolfe |
|
cba53e2
|
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..
|
|
|
Gene Wolfe |