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Shadow & Claw

Gene Wolfe

Top 10 Best Quotes

“People don't want other people to be people.”

“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. 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.”

“Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.”

“There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.”

“When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.”

“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.”

“No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death – every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence. The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say, “I will,” and “I will not,” and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.”

“Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.”

“Time turns our lies into truths.”

“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. [...] We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.”

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Book Keywords:

knowledge, reality, strength, lies, gifts, selfishness, payment, time, hope, truth, symbols, merit, people, labels, weakness, belief, magic

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