Sword & Citadel: The Second Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'

We are as solid as most truly false things are—a dance of particles in space. Only the things no one can touch are true, as you should know by now.

“You’re a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism doesn’t make materialism true.

so we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of our minds a counter at which we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present.

There is a payment made by Nature to those who undergo hardships; it is that the lesser ones, at which people whose lives have been easier would complain, seem almost comfortable.

Now came the strangest happening I have to tell in all this already overlong tale; yet there was no sound or sight associated with it, no speaking beast or gigantic woman. It was only that as I heard him I felt a pressure against my breastbone, as I had felt it in Thrax when I knew I should be going north with the Claw. I remembered the girl in the

“You extend hope at one moment and snatch it away at the next.” “Not I, but history.

“You are the advocate of the dead.” The old man nodded. “I am. People talk about being fair to this one and that one, but nobody I ever heard talks about doing right by them. We take everything they had, which is all right. And spit, most often, on their opinions, which I suppose is all right too. But we ought to remember now and then how much of w

rather a sort of philosophical horror at the thought of a cosmos in which rude pictures of beasts and monsters had been painted with flaming suns.

I am, perhaps, mad in certain respects, but I know what those respects are, and such self-deceptions are no part of them.