Quotes from The Shadow of the Torturer

“...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“I felt that pressure of time that is perhaps the surest indication we have left childhood behind.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“The necropolis has never seemed a city of death to me; I know its purple roses (which other people think so hideous) shelter hundreds of small animals and birds. The executions I have seen performed and have performed myself so often are no more than a trade, a butchery of human beings who are for the most part less innocent and less valuable than cattle. When I think of my own death, or the death of someone who has been kind to me, or even of the death of the sun, the image that comes to my mind is that of the nenuphar, with its glossy, pale leaves and azure flower. Under flower and leaves are black roots as fine and strong as hair, reaching down into the dark waters.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“Tous, nous aimons ce que nous détruisons.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when I came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came from the ribbon sewn to the headband so that I might mark my place. The texture that tickled my fingers still was that of the paper in which the book was printed. The smell in my nostrils was old leather, still wearing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books themselves, when I began to understand their care.”

His grip on my shoulder tightened. “We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with the thickest gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.”

“We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too who leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here—though I can no longer tell you where—no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard defining edges.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“I have said that I cannot explain my desire for her, and it is true. I loved her with a love thirsty and desperate. I felt that we two might commit some act so atrocious that the world, seeing us, would find it irresistible.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“Time turns our lies into truth”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“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 anointed they will say, 'He is a torturer.' You may follow the plow or the drum, but still you will hear, 'He is a torturer.' Do you understand that?”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“All love that which they destroy.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“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 maintained for three hundred years against the return of the Autarch Sulpicius (and into which, in consequence, no one ever comes) I read outward for a period of fifteen years, often finishing two books in one day.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“I was miserable before I knew I was no longer happy”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“It was in this instant of confusion that I realized for the first time that I am in some degree insane.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“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, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“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, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“Here Rose the graced, not Rose the chaste, reposes;
The smell that rises is no smell of roses.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

“Here Rose the Graced, not Rose the Chaste, reposes;
The scent that rises is no scent of roses.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

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