Top 100 Gene Wolfe Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Gene Wolfe

#1. Gene Wolfe has produced a work of art that can satisfy adult appetites and in which even the most fantastical elements register as poetry rather than as penny-whistle whimsy.

Thomas M. Disch

#2. I am filthy. So is Doris, but we'll bathe and change clothes and be clean. Your filth is within you. If it were gone, you'd collapse.

Gene Wolfe

#3. The gem, which he had supposed colorless, caught a ray of sunlight from the god-gate in the roof and flashed a watery green. For some reason, it reminded him of her eyes. He put it to his lips, his thoughts full of things that could never be.

Gene Wolfe

#4. The best offense is a good defense, but a bad defense is offensive.

Gene Wolfe

#5. My whole life experience feeds into my writing. I think that must be true for every writer. Clearly the Army and combat were major influences; just the same, you need to understand that many of the writers we have now couldn't load a revolver.

Gene Wolfe

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

Gene Wolfe

#7. We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last.

Gene Wolfe

#8. There comes a time when a sorcerer must triumph on his own or die.

Gene Wolfe

#9. Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

Gene Wolfe

#10. I have seldom found a lot to love about my fellow human beings, even when I liked them;

Gene Wolfe

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

Gene Wolfe

#12. You have understood me better than I wanted, as the man said when he looked in the mirror.

Gene Wolfe

#13. I felt that pressure of time that is perhaps the surest indication we have left childhood behind.

Gene Wolfe

#14. 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

#15. There was a time when she did not remember my name or that we were married, but she still remembered that she loved me.

Gene Wolfe

#16. You can't order the waves to be silent, madame," Baldanders told her. "They are coming, and they are bitter with salt.

Gene Wolfe

#17. My rule is never save bits. They get the way, and you don't think of anything new. Put 'em in. Make a big mess.

Gene Wolfe

#18. I don't think anyone is more intrinsically holy. People experience God in many ways; and it seems to me that God does what the rest of us do: He chooses the means that best gets His message across.

Gene Wolfe

#19. Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude characters of their speech.

Gene Wolfe

#20. You have heard tales of necromancers,' she said, 'who fish for the spirits of the dead. Do you know there are vivimancers among the dead, who call to them those who can make them live again?

Gene Wolfe

#21. A youthful American voice isn't particularly challenging - I've been a young American, and they're all around me. I can walk from my house to Barrington High School.

Gene Wolfe

#22. It is beyond value, which means it is worthless.

Gene Wolfe

#23. I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me

Gene Wolfe

#24. We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized.

Gene Wolfe

#25. That was a fine story," I told her, "one of the best that I've ever heard." "I had to live it," she replied, "and it is far better to hear such stories than to live them, I promise you, though it ended so happily.

Gene Wolfe

#26. 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

#27. He was a bad man, a bully and a thug, yet he was deeply religious in his way - I very much doubt that he would have made such a thing up. It was not his sort of lie, if you know what I mean.

Gene Wolfe

#28. For an instant she hesitated. Baldanders said, 'You may trust him. The doctor has his own way of looking at the world, but he lies less than people believe.

Gene Wolfe

#29. I was young, so that I desired high things only.

Gene Wolfe

#30. It was a cruel and lawless place without him, and it seems to me that it's better with him, if anything. A bad horse needs a big whip, as the saying goes.

Gene Wolfe

#31. Dorcas's skin was flecked with little golden freckles, and she was so slender that I was always aware of her bones; yet she was more desirable in her imperfections than Jolenta had ever been in the lushness of her flesh.

Gene Wolfe

#32. I have said that I cannot explain my desire for her, and it is true. I loved her with a love thirsty and desperate. I felt that we two might commit some act so atrocious that the world, seeing us, would find it irresistible.

Gene Wolfe

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

Gene Wolfe

#34. He wandered in the high, hot lands where men have few laws and many slaves.

Gene Wolfe

#35. I take his gold. I'm hated for that by men who would grovel for it, were it offered to them. Myt-ser

Gene Wolfe

#36. all the things people have said were The Secret after they had talked to mystagogues on far worlds or studied the popul vuh of the magicians, or fasted in the trunks of holy trees.

Gene Wolfe

#37. One of the easiest ways to dominate a man is to demand something he cannot supply.

Gene Wolfe

#38. The chief thing is to begin, after all - after which the chief thing is to finish.

Gene Wolfe

#39. 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

#40. Possibly I was mistaken, but it seemed to me that he went pale. At last he muttered, It isn't much of a ghost story, I'm afraid, but then I didn't make it up.

Gene Wolfe

#41. Each of us finds his way, his place; we rattle around the universe until everything fits; this is life; this is science, or something better than science.

Gene Wolfe

#42. He imagined himself a mouse descending a clear stream in half an eggshell, the master of a comet enfolding a hollow world.

Gene Wolfe

#43. It seems to me that you can almost define civilization by saying it's people who are not willing to hurt other people because the other people are different.

Gene Wolfe

#44. Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt that thematic closure is never attainable.

Gene Wolfe

#45. You do not characterize by telling the reader about the character. You do it by showing the character thinking, speaking and acting in a characteristic way. You simply show it and shut up.

Gene Wolfe

#46. Why should the Increate protect us from ourselves? We might protect ourselves from ourselves. It may be that he will help us only when we come to regret what we have done.

Gene Wolfe

#47. Do not start a story unless you have an ending in mind. You can change the story's ending if you wish, but you should always have a destination.

Gene Wolfe

#48. Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.

Gene Wolfe

#49. His eyes say quite plainly that he once trusted someone, that he has been repenting it for longer than you or I have been alive, and that he will never take the chance again.

Gene Wolfe

#50. People don't want other people to be people.

Gene Wolfe

#51. A young man seeks a woman and finds her and is great and dies to the world. Afterward he is never as great again, but the woman is a comfort to him, reminding him of the time that was, and he is a little again with her what once he was wholly.

Gene Wolfe

#52. In ancient Greece, skeptics were those who thought, not those who scoffed.

Gene Wolfe

#53. All of us ... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

Gene Wolfe

#54. 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

#55. We can think only of creatures, of things He's made. Creatures are all we know, and can be all we know until we know Him. When we think of Him like that, we find we can't believe. He can't be like a creature any more than a carpenter is like a table.

Gene Wolfe

#56. God is the nest we build together.

Gene Wolfe

#57. 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

#58. Don't nobody ever want it to rain," the nearest of the sellers of beasts remarked philosophically, "but everybody wants to go on eatin'.

Gene Wolfe

#59. What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.

Gene Wolfe

#60. You believe me wise because I taught you once, but I have not been north, as you have. You have seen (what) I have never seen ... You flatter me by asking my opinion.

Gene Wolfe

#61. He is the oldest of our sons, and although I loved him, I did not like him.

Gene Wolfe

#62. The past stood at my shoulder, naked and defenseless as all dead things, as though it were time itself that had been laid open by the fall of the mountain.

Gene Wolfe

#63. Something like that." "You

Gene Wolfe

#64. Though trodden beneath the shepherd's heel, the wild hyacinth blooms on the ground.

Gene Wolfe

#65. Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night, Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to. Flight.

Gene Wolfe

#66. Of all the good things in the world, the only ones humanity can claim for itself are stories and music;

Gene Wolfe

#67. We talked of love, and all we said would fill a book thicker than this. Yet all we said was only this: that I loved her and she loved me, and we had waited long and long, would be parted no longer.

Gene Wolfe

#68. To be cursed by a god is to be touched by a god. To be touched by any god is to share divinity in some small measure. When the high priest leaves the sanctuary he strips off his clothing and bathes. Did you know that? His clothing is burned. I

Gene Wolfe

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

Gene Wolfe

#70. If I had seen one miracle fail, I had witnessed another; and even a seemingly purposeless miracle is an inexhaustible source of hope, because it proves to us that since we do not understand everything, our defeats - so much more numerous than our few and empty victories - may be equally specious.

Gene Wolfe

#71. Readers have the power that professors pretend they wield. Millions of words of professorial contempt have failed to kill Kipling. Praising Shaw to the skies has been vain.

Gene Wolfe

#72. It was earliest morning, when even small trees cast long shadows and scarlet foxes trot denward through the dew like flecks of fire.

Gene Wolfe

#73. One can't found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction.

Gene Wolfe

#74. It is well, I think, for us to learn to tell evil from good; but it has its price, as everything does. We leave our evil friend behind.

Gene Wolfe

#75. 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

#76. I have read only the first 'Harry Potter' book. I thought it excellent, perhaps the best thing written for older children since The Hobbit. I wish the books had been around when my kids were the right age for them.

Gene Wolfe

#77. 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

#78. The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just as the momentous events of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when the sun is drawing toward the dark,our own shadows race into the past to trouble mankind's dreams.

Gene Wolfe

#79. Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as rain.

Gene Wolfe

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

Gene Wolfe

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. This is what mankind has always wanted... that the environment should respond to human thought. That is the core of magic and the oldest dream of mankind, and, here on me, it is fact.

Gene Wolfe

#84. If they are too quarrelsome to unite against him, and so violent that they'll willingly pay his taxes to be protected from one another, they have no reason to complain.

Gene Wolfe

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

Gene Wolfe

#86. As I drew breath, I heard bone snap - a horrible sound, but a joyful one because the bone was not mine.

Gene Wolfe

#87. Whether the medium is ready for consumers is better judged by those consumers. I sometimes read online - but not often. The stigma is attached to pay scales. Much online publication is no pay or small pay.

Gene Wolfe

#88. My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.

Gene Wolfe

#89. Dorcas belonged, as I now realize, to that vast group of women (which may, indeed, include all women) who betray us - and to that special type who betray us not for some present rival but for their own pasts.

Gene Wolfe

#90. Where there is no repentance, forgiveness is only permission by another name. I

Gene Wolfe

#91. his body close to the ground, he turned and

Gene Wolfe

#92. And when he beheld their dark sails, smutted by the burning tar that had blinded their enemy, he believed them blackened in mourning for the young man, and he threw himself down, and so perished. For no man lives long when his dreams are dead.

Gene Wolfe

#93. A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart.

Gene Wolfe

#94. I said he had called them because it was from his mind that we drew them, seeking those who hated him, or at least had reason to. The giant you saw might have mastered the Commonwealth, had Severian not defeated him. The blond woman could not forgive him for bringing her back from death.

Gene Wolfe