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

...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.

Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.

Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.

People don't want other people to be people.

Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.