Gene Wolfe Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

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.

Gene Wolfe
There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.

Gene Wolfe
Everyone who is grieved at anything, or discontented, is like a pig for sacrifice, kicking and squealing. Like a dove for sacrifice is he who laments in silence. Our one distinction is that it is given to us to consent, if we will, to the necessity imposed upon us.

Gene Wolfe
If you rob someone who would help you if you needed help you only rob yourself.... Do you imagine you can be cruel without teaching others to be cruel to you?

Gene Wolfe
Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.

Gene Wolfe
He is not mad. He is only more clever than you. It is not the same.

Gene Wolfe
When neither our fellows nor our gods spoil our plans, we spoil them ourselves.

Gene Wolfe
There are people who love birds so much they free them. There are others who love them so much they cage them.

Gene Wolfe
What little I have learned in the course of a long life, regarding the gods, I have tried to forget.

Gene Wolfe
Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers.

Gene Wolfe
People who get eyeball arthritis see only what they're supposed to see, like that TV screen.

Gene Wolfe
When a client is driven to the utmost extremity, it is warmth and food and ease from pain he wants. Peace and justice come afterward. Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize.

Gene Wolfe
No man has a home unless he is master of a place where he must please no one — a place where he can go and lock the door behind him.

Gene Wolfe
We choose—or choose not—to be alone when we decide whom we will accept as our fellows, and whom we will reject. Thus an eremite in a mountain is in company, because the birds and coneys, the initiates whose words live in his 'forest books,' and the winds—the messengers of the Increate—are his companions. Another man, living in the midst of millions, may be alone, because there are none but enemies and victims around him.

Gene Wolfe
We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.

Gene Wolfe
Paradoxes explain everything. Since they do, they cannot be explained.

Gene Wolfe
I have never in my whole life had a fight with a smart person or even seen anybody else have one either. That is because when the fight starts the smart people are not there anymore. They have gone off someplace else, and when it is over they come back and tell you how much they did in the fight, only it is all lies.

Gene Wolfe
A hundred wise men have said in various ways that love transcends the power of death, and millions of fools have supposed that they meant nothing by it. At this late hour in my life I have learned what they meant. They meant that love transcends death. They are correct.

Gene Wolfe
We think that we know a man or a woman, when so much of what we know is actually that man's or that woman's situation, his or her place on the board of life. Move the pawn to the last row and see her rise in armor, sword in hand.

Gene Wolfe
The gods smile on us, my son, or so it is written. It's a wonder they don't laugh aloud.

Gene Wolfe
There is more to be learned from any good teacher than the subject taught.

Gene Wolfe
When a tree is very old, yet still lives, sometimes the limbs are strangely twisted.

Gene Wolfe
The only actors who can really do justice to their parts are the ones who don't know what they are.

Gene Wolfe
We can dive to the bottom of the sea and some say NASA will fly us to the stars, and I have known men to plunge into the past — or the future — and drown. But there's one place where we can't go. We can't go where we are already. We can't go home, because our minds, and our hearts, and our immortal souls are already there there.

Gene Wolfe
There is no limit to stupidity. - Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.

Gene Wolfe