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The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1) QUOTES

The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1) QUOTES

21 " A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun. "

― Gene Wolfe , The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1)

22 " There exists between them [the beast handlers] and the animals they bring to the pits a bond much like that between our clients and ourselves. Now I have traveled much farther from our tower, but I have found always that the pattern of our guild is repeated mindlessly in the societies of every trade, so that they are all of them torturers, just as we. His quarry stands to the hunter as our clients to us; those who buy to the tradesman; the enemies of the Commonwealth to the soldier; the governed to the governors; men to women. All love that which they destroy. "

― Gene Wolfe , The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1)

23 " By slow degrees, a feeling of disquiet seized me. I was miserable before I knew I was no longer happy, and bowed with responsibility when I did not yet fully understand I held it. "

― Gene Wolfe , The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1)

24 " By the same argument, the life must reside in each joint of every finger, and surely that is impossible."

"How big is a man's life?" asked Ultan.

"I have no way of knowing, but isn't it larger than that?"

"You see it from the beginning, and anticipate much. I, recollecting it from its termination, know how little there has been. "

― Gene Wolfe , The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1)

25 " Gurloes was one of the most complex men I have known, because he was a complex man trying to be simple. Not a simple, but a complex man's idea of simplicity. "

― Gene Wolfe , The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1)

26 " In our commercial society, one may set one's price as high as one wishes, but to refuse to sell at any price is treason. "

― Gene Wolfe , The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1)

27 " With him I hated the Autarchy, though I had no notion of what might replace it. With him I despised the exultants who failed to rise against the Autarch and bound the fairest of their daughters to him in ceremonial concubinage. With him I detested the people for their lack of discipline and a common purpose. "

― Gene Wolfe , The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1)

28 " But there is no such reason to mourn the destruction of a colony of cells: such a colony dies each time a loaf of bread goes into the oven. If a man is no more than such a colony, a man is nothing; but we instinctively know that man is more. What happens then to the part that is more? "

― Gene Wolfe , The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1)

29 " My hunger fed at least as ravenously upon her imperfections. "

― Gene Wolfe , The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1)

30 " Each picture in the room beyond contained a book. Sometimes they were many, or prominent; some I had to study for some time before I saw the corner of a binding thrusting from the pocket of a woman’s skirt or realized that some strangely wrought spool held words spun like thread. "

― Gene Wolfe , The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1)

31 " Here Rose the Graced, not Rose the Chaste, reposes;
The scent that rises is no scent of roses. "

― Gene Wolfe , The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1)

32 " She possessed the hopeful, hopeless courage of the poor, which is perhaps the most appealing of all human qualities "

― Gene Wolfe , The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1)