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 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

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

I felt the fear that has always come upon me on the many occasions of my life when some small incident has made me aware of an incipient insanity.

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.

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.

“And you, I think, are a good man of the kind who does not know himself to be one—some say that is the only kind.

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

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