Quotes from Gene Wolfe

it seems to me that no poet can be greater than the one who announces to a man that freedom is his right.

The idea is that a beard makes it easy to cut a man's throat. You grab it and jerk his head up." "I see," Silk said. Mentally, he cancelled the beard he had only just resolved to grow.

And yet I loved her still, or would have loved her if I could.

Flechas tengo para el corazón del sabio, Guiadas por la naturaleza infalible hasta el blanco, Pero cuando tiendo mi arco ante la multitud de la llanura, Los ignorantes sólo oyen al viento y a él todo lo atribuyen".

Because there is no opportunity to act. It is always wise to talk a great deal, discussing what has been done and what may be done, when nothing can be done. All the great political movements of history were born in prisons.

I thought I saw something and borrowed his big brass telescope. And there it was. The tall, proud trees and the waves lapping a beach of blood-colored sand. I looked and looked, and pretty soon I started to cry. If I could tell you why, I would, but I cannot. Tears ran down my face, and I could not breathe right. I took the telescope down and wiped my eyes and blew my nose. And when I looked again, it was gone.

Mainframe is dispersed among them all. Imagine millions of millions of tiny circuits like those in a card—billions of billions, actually. The warmth of each is less than the twinkle of a firefly; but there are so many that if they were packed together their own heat would destroy them. They would become a second sun. As things are it is always summer here, thanks to those circuits.

Mainframe is dispersed among them all. Imagine millions of millions of tiny circuits like those in a card—billions of billions, actually. The warmth of each is less than the twinkle of a firefly; but there are so many that if they were packed together their own heat would destroy them. They would become a second sun. As things are it is always summer here, thanks to those circuits." "That's what you call the little wiggly gold lines in card?

I sometimes think the reason the guild has endured so long is that it serves as a focus for the hatred of the people, drawing it from the Autarch, the exultants, and the army, and even in some degree from the pale cacogens who sometimes visit Urth from the farther stars.

Find girl?" He had lost his desire to talk, but the intensity of his emotions drove the words forth. "What did he want with her!" As he spoke, the litter sped past a shop with a zither and a dusty bassoon in its window. But Caldé Silk of Viron did not see them.

The game is nearly over,' she whispered. 'That is what I came to tell you. Did you think it would go on forever?

You think whatever is wrong with you is contagious, then?' ... 'Yes, but you hae it already. You caught it from your mother. Death.

You that read all of this in a year that I will never see will think me wretched, perhaps... But know this: The best and happiest of my hours you know nothing about. I have seen days like gold.

I believe rather that when I was alone I felt I had in some fashion lost my individuality; to the thrush and the rabbit I had been not Severian, but Man. The many people who like to be utterly alone, and particularly to be utterly alone in a wilderness, do so, I believe, because they enjoy playing that part. But I wanted to be a particular person again, and so I sought the mirror of other persons, which would show me that I was not as they were.

All of us, I suppose, 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.

Catch Catodon … cast out his conation.

How strange it is that the sky, which by day is a stationary ground on which the clouds are seen to move, by night becomes the backdrop for Earth's own motion, so that we feel her rolling beneath us as a sailor feels the running of the tide.

Oaths are only mere weak things of honor compared to the benefits we give to others, which are things of the spirit; let us once save another, and we are his for life.

It was a long sentence for a monkey.

You have no power over me, neither you nor they. I am not afraid of pain, or of death. There is only one living woman I desire

as a woman alone in a large house refrains from looking into mirrors, and instead busies herself with trivial errands, so that she may catch no glimpse of the thing whose feet she hears at times on the stairs.

This unfocused terror, this faceless menace of the night, was the earliest of all my childhood fears; and as such, now that childhood was behind me, it had the homey quality of all childhood things when we are fully grown.

it's not wise to deny everything you can't understand.

I had been crazy since I was born, and now I was sane and it felt wonderful. The wind and the waves were sitting in that cave with me twisting thread, and nature was not something outside anymore.