Gene Wolfe Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gene Wolfe
There is no human quality more attractive than the courage of the weak.

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

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

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

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
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