Gene Wolfe Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

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

Gene Wolfe
Every theory is true in some discipline. The beauty of this is that it carries its own confirmation.

Gene Wolfe
When we're young, we notice things that are young, like ourselves. New grass on old graves. New leaves on old trees

Gene Wolfe
We don't harm the gods when we mingle their names with our curses and obscenities. We harm ourselves. I said that I didn't regard most gods as holy, but they don't have to be for our malice and mockery to recoil upon ourselves.

Gene Wolfe
Some writers say they cannot write in front of a window; many say they cannot function without almost perfect quiet. A writer with only two hours a day can write in the back of an open truck on the Interstate.

Gene Wolfe
Nobody bothers crazy people. [...] In the end, maybe it's the crazy people who win after all.

Gene Wolfe
Men build scales, but the gods blow upon the lighter pan.

Gene Wolfe
Perhaps I need to begin before I can think clearly about the task. The chief thing is to begin, after all — after which the chief thing is to finish.

Gene Wolfe
Most Christians know next to nothing about the life and teachings of Christ and are afraid to learn, sensing that the knowledge will upset their preconceptions.

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

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

Gene Wolfe
Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

Gene Wolfe
Be careful about extending credit, too, and doubly careful about refusing to extend it.

Gene Wolfe
We're going to fight to the end. But it's better if you fight to somebody else's end.

Gene Wolfe
Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it.

Gene Wolfe
When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.

Gene Wolfe
So powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.

Gene Wolfe
That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.

Gene Wolfe
Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight.

Gene Wolfe
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.

Gene Wolfe
There's a certain kind of lonely man who rejects love, because he believes that anyone who offers it wouldn't be a lover worth having.

Gene Wolfe
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.

Gene Wolfe
I was trapped in admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the captive of some long-vanished pine.

Gene Wolfe
You're a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism doesn't make materialism true. Don't you know that? In the final summing up, it is spirit and dream, thought and love and act that matter.

Gene Wolfe
Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.

Gene Wolfe