Gene Wolfe Quotes

48 quotes in 840 categories

• 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…
• You must know the story of how the race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away all the wild half of…
• 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.…
• 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…
• 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 was when I found out that the best way in the world to make yourself feel better when you have hit bottom is to…
• 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,…
• What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
• That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
• ...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
• 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,…
• We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.
• We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.
• Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.
• Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
• When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
• People don't want other people to be people.
• There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.
• All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
• It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the…

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