The Urth of the New Sun: The sequel to 'The Book of the New Sun'

“It is easy for those who need not judge, or judging need not toil for justice, to complain of inequity and talk of impartiality. When one must actually judge, as Tzadkiel does, he finds he cannot be just to one without being unjust to another.

It’s easy—very easy—to slay a ruler. But it’s very difficult to prevent a worse one from coming to his place.”

I think, raising me a second time; but for many things (of which that moment was for me the chief) there can be no second time.

“Then you must know that all are scourged alike. And yet the nearer to success, the worse the pain each feels. That is a law we cannot change.”

It is said that they who wander in darkness, and still more they who do so in a mist, merely scribe circles across the plain.

and I thought then (as I think now) how strange it was that they should have been so brave when they faced a horror, but such cowards when confronted by the palinode of fate.

But they don’t really do anything, and in their hearts they know it. They’re afraid to use their power, or at least the best of them are, knowing they can’t use it wisely.”

understood at that moment how the Increate must feel about his creation, and I knew the sorrow he knows because the things he creates pass away. I think it may be a law binding even him—that is to say, a logical necessity—that nothing can be eternal in the future that is not rooted in eternity in the past, as he himself is.

“Do you mean that you do not understand me? And why should you? I do not understand myself, Severian, or you. Yet I am as I am,

“Is all the world a war of good and bad? Have you not thought it might be something more?”