"The Book of the New Sun - The Shadow of the Torturer"

[fiefoe]

Gene Wolfe compares a writer to a carnifex and the readers to the onlookers to the execution. Not sure if I feel flattered about that.
The book is so otherworldly and oblique that I have a really hard time categorizing it. (As with a beautiful face, my instinct reaction upon seeing it is to recall whether I've seen similar faces before.) At times it's more allegory than fantasy, but then the world-building is simply too deep for that label. Certainly, reading this book made my dreams more interesting.

• 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.
• The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.
• The colored days that had so long been drawn forth like a chain of conjuror's scarves come to and end,
• In the end I looked, having drained the dregs of pleasant dread.
• His quarry stands to the hunter as our clients to us; those who buy to the tradesman;.. men to women. All love that which they destroy.
• 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.
• "You see (life) from the beginning, and anticipate much. I recollecting it from its termination, know how little there has been."
• that pressure of time that is perhaps the surest indication we have left childhood behind
• It is said that it is the peculiar quality of time to conserve fact, and that it does so by rendering our past falsehoods true.
• Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
• Travel encouraged sedition, and he wished goods to enter and leave the city by the river, where they might be easily taxed.
• Art had been lavished upon (the sword); but it is the function of art to render attractive and significant those thing that without it would not be so, and so art had nothing to give her.
• Among such a throng, there is no alternative to peace. Disturbances cannot be tolerated, because disturbances cannot be extinguished.
• If there are layers of reality beneath the reality we see, .. then in one of those more profound realities, Dr. Talos's face was a fox's mask on a wall,
• So I became, in appearance at least, a pilgrim bound for some vague northern shrine. Have I said that time turns our lies into truths?
• She possessed the hopeful, hopeless courage of the poor, which is perhaps the most appealing of all human qualities.
• The fact was that I had no compunction about arriving late for my death, and was beginning to have difficulty in taking seriously a combat fought with flowers.
• For an instant I saw a flash of anger in her face. Then it was spread over with an unction of philosophical irony, the secretion of her injured self-esteem.
• Perhaps when night closes our eyes there is less order than we believe. Perhaps, indeed, it is this lack of order we perceive as darkness.
• The world is filled half with evil and half with good. We can tilt it forward so that more good runs into our minds, or back, so that more runs into this. {Dorcus is a rare bid too.}
• (The color of their leaves).. seemed to imply the existence of light somewhere, some inconceivable distance away, of a spectrum that would have withered or perhaps ennobled the world.
• By the use of the language of sorrow I had for the time being obliterated my sorrow - so powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.
• It was just at that moment when lengthening shadows cease to be shadows at all and become instead pools of blackness.
• Justice is a high thing.. I was young, so that I desired high things only. Now.. I know it is better to have all things, high and low, than to have the high only.
• "It's a gambling proposition," Dr. Talos explained. "And I confess to loving them. The money in the hat is a sure thing.. But the dropsies! "
• 'Who shall fold the solemn-winged moth, with wings each like stuns'ls, into the broken cocoon left hanging like a sarcophagus? '