# Quote — Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer

> I think it is in this that we find the real difference between those women to whom if we are to remain men we must offer our lives, and those who (again–if we are to remain men) we must overpower and outwit if we can, and use as we never would a beast: that the second will never permit us to give them what we give the first.

- Author: [Gene Wolfe](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gene-wolfe.md)
- Book: [The Shadow of the Torturer](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gene-wolfe/the-shadow-of-the-torturer.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_New_Sun#The_Shadow_of_the_Torturer_(1980)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/gene-wolfe/the-shadow-of-the-torturer/i-think-it

## More from this book

> The Increate maintains all things in order surely; and the theologicans say light is his shadow. Must it not be then that in darkness order grows ever less? [...] Perhaps when night closes our eyes there is less order than we believe. Perhaps, indeed, it is this lack of order we perceive as darkness, a randomization of the waves of energy (like the sea), the fields of energy (like a farm) that appear to our deluded eyes—set by light in an order of which they themselves are incapable—to be the real world.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gene-wolfe/the-shadow-of-the-torturer/the-increate-maintains.md)

> The soldiers forced him to his knees and I lifted my sword, forever blotting out the sun.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gene-wolfe/the-shadow-of-the-torturer/the-soldiers-forced.md)

> Art had been lavished upon her; but it is the function of art to render attractive and significant those things that without it would not be so, and so art had nothing to give her.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gene-wolfe/the-shadow-of-the-torturer/art-had-been.md)