# Quote — Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer

> It is said that it is the peculiar quality of time to conserve fact, and that it does so by rendering our past falsehoods true. So it was with me. I had lied in saying that I loved the guild—that I desired nothing but to remain in its embrace. Now I found those lies become truths.

- 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/it-is-said

## 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)