Gene Wolfe Quotes - Page 2

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Authority Children Past Pleasure Writing

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

Believe, Thinking, Talking

Gene Wolfe (1994). “Sword & Citadel: The Second Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'”, p.55, Macmillan

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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

Writing, Character, Thinking

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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

Mean, Thinking, People

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A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what is commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice, and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.

Gene Wolfe

Children, Light, Two

Gene Wolfe (1972). “The fifth head of Cerberus: three novellas”, Ultramarine Pub Co

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

Gene Wolfe

Real, Flaws, Made

Gene Wolfe (1994). “Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'”, p.119, Macmillan

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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

Book, Men, Wind

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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

Lonely, Believe, Men

Gene Wolfe (2001). “There Are Doors”, p.277, Macmillan

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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

Writing, Mind, Wish

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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

Writing, Army, Thinking

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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

Pain, Rain, Justice

Gene Wolfe (2011). “The Citadel of the Autarch: Urth: Book of the New Sun”, p.119, Hachette UK

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

Gene Wolfe

Men, Desire, Despise

Gene Wolfe (1994). “Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'”, p.70, Macmillan

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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

Gene Wolfe

Reality, Psychological, Mechanism

Gene Wolfe (1994). “Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'”, p.84, Macmillan

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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

Clever, Thinking, Sight

Gene Wolfe (1989). “Soldier of Arete”, p.362, Macmillan

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

Gene Wolfe

Unforgivable Sin, Remains, Capable

Gene Wolfe (1994). “Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'”, p.221, Macmillan

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

Gene Wolfe

Change, Echoes, Tanks

Gene Wolfe (1986). “Soldier of the Mist”, p.114, Macmillan

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Woody Allen once said: "You know there must be intelligent life in space. The question is do they have good Chinese restaurants and do they deliver?" Which is really a joke, but it is also a very profound remark. When you say do they have good Chinese restaurants, what you're really saying is, "How much are they like us?" And when you say, "Do they deliver?" you're saying, "Can they get here?" Both of which are profound questions. And at the present, we have no answers.

Gene Wolfe

Intelligent, Space, Profound

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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

Science, Mind, Facts

Gene Wolfe (1997). “The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories”, p.351, Macmillan

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Women believe -- or at least often pretend to believe -- that all our tenderness for them springs from desire; that we love them when we have not for a time enjoyed them, and dismiss them when we are sated, or to express it more precisely, exhausted. There is no truth in this idea, though it may be made to appear true. When we are rigid with desire, we are apt to pretend a great tenderness in the hope of satisfying that desire; but at no other time are we in fact so liable to treat women brutally, and so unlikely to feel any deep emotion but one.

Gene Wolfe

Spring, Women, Believe

Gene Wolfe (1994). “Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'”, p.372, Macmillan

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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

School, Voice, House

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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

Struggle, Book, Reading

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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

Spring, Wine, Men

Gene Wolfe (1997). “The Urth of the New Sun: The sequel to 'The Book of the New Sun'”, p.329, Macmillan

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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

Sex, Mean, Fiction

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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 worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual.

Gene Wolfe

Memories, Childhood, May

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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

Dream, Children, War

Gene Wolfe (1994). “Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'”, p.110, Orb Books

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I believe there is no other difference between those who are called courageous and those who are branded craven than that the second are fearful before the danger and the first after it. No one can be much frightened, certainly, during a period of great and immanent peril -- the mind is too much concentrated on the thing itself, and on the actions necessary to meet or avoid it. The coward is a coward, then, because he has brought his fear with him; persons we think cowardly will sometimes amaze us by their bravery, if they have had no forewarning of their danger.

Gene Wolfe

Believe, Thinking, Differences

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Born: May 7, 1931
Occupation: Writer
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