Gene Wolfe
87 quotes
Biography
"There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden."
"Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities."
"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."
"When a tree is very old, yet still lives, sometimes the limbs are strangely twisted."
"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."
"“That the environment should respond to human thought. That is the core of magic and the oldest dream of mankind.”"
"It will help her if she wants to be helped; if she insists on clasping her illness to her it will not."
"Evolution teaches us, Nicholas, that the original purpose of language was to ritualize men’s threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later."
"Of the nature of Death and the Dead we may enumerate twelve kinds. First there are those who become new gods, for whom new universes are born. Second those who praise. Third those who fight as soldiers in the unending war with evil. Fourth those who amuse themselves among flowers and sweet springs with sports. Fifth those who dwell in gardens of bliss, or are tortured. Sixth those who continue as in life. Seventh those who turn the wheel of the universe. Eighth those who find in their graves their mothers' wombs and in one life circle forever. Ninth ghosts. Tenth those born again as men in their grandsons' time. Eleventh those who return as beasts or trees. And last those who sleep."
"They based their extrapolations on numbers. That worked as long as money, which is easily measured numerically, was the principle motivating force in human affairs. But as time progressed, human actions became responsive instead to a multitude of incommensurable vectors."
"An exaggerated and solemn respect always indicates a loss of faith."
"Time passed, slipping through the waist of the universe's great hourglass like the eroded soil of this continent slipping down her rivers to the seas."
"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."
"The only actors who can really do justice to their parts are the ones who don't know what they are."
"Nobody bothers crazy people. [...] In the end, maybe it's the crazy people who win after all."
"Very small, child, are the flying days of love, and men and women must catch them when they can, if they are to know love at all."
"He was proud, like all lonely men. Lonely men must be proud or die."
"Prince of parable, I desire to see those gardens of lasting delight which Allah—the Creator! the Ever Beneficent!—reserves for the faithful. How am I to do so if I tell lies?" "By lying to Allah, I suppose."
"People who wish to be lost always get their way."
"Legend declares that at the christening of our family’s founder a somewhat deaf fairy who had been asked to render him and his descendants mettlesome, made us meddlesome instead."
"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."
"People who get eyeball arthritis see only what they're supposed to see, like that TV screen."
"People who fear death live no longer than those who don't, and live scared."
"There is no human quality more attractive than the courage of the weak."
"It doesn't move because he has fastened it in place until he finds out why it doesn't move."