Gene Wolfe Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Gene Wolfe
Year followed struggling year for me, and all that time I read — I suppose few have ever read so. I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

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

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

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

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
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
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
Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.

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

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

Gene Wolfe