Quotes from Gene Wolfe

It was in this instant of confusion that I realized for the first time that I am in some degree insane. It could be argued that it was the most harrowing of my life.

However much I love a woman—or however little—I find I want her most when I can no longer have her.

Sometimes when all our attention is thus focused on memory, our eyes, unguided by ourselves, will distinguish from a mass of detail some single object, presenting it with a clarity never achieved by concentration.

She stopped spinning to smile at me. I knew she meant it to be friendly, but her teeth were terrible and looked as sharp as razors.

Every cat is royal," Mani declared in a tone that said he would be mad if you argued. "I am myself.

And you, I think, are a good man of the kind who does not know himself to be one—some say that is the only kind.

Is that the moon? I have been told it's more fertile.

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?

I knew that I was a child, and that no man can be a man who is not.

Love and desire are said to be no more than cousins, and I had found it so until I walked with Jolenta's flaccid arm about my neck. But it is not really true. Rather, the love of women was the dark side of a feminine ideal I had nourished for myself

Think of a tree that splits a rock. It gathers water, the sun's life-bringing heat … and all the stuff of life for its own use. In time it dies and rots to dress the earth, that its own roots have made from stone. Its shadow gone, fresh seeds spring up; in time a forest flourishes where it stood.

You think that time is a single thread. It is a weaving, a tapestry that extends forever in all directions.

I lifted my sword to Heaven then, to the diminished sun with the worm in his heart; and I called, His life for mine, New Sun, by your anger and my hope!

Each picture in the room beyond contained a book. Sometimes they were many, or prominent; some I had to study for some time before I saw the corner of a binding thrusting from the pocket of a woman's skirt or realized that some strangely wrought spool held words spun like thread.

I saw how little it weighed on the scale of things whether I lived or died, though my life was precious to me. And of those two thoughts I forged a mood by which I stood ready to grasp each smallest chance to live, yet in which I cared not too much whether I saved myself or not. By that mood, as I think, I did live; it has been so good a friend to me that I have endeavored to wear it ever since, succeeding not always, but often.

That which you call nothing is what holds all things apart.

If you have a machine with three or four parts, you can shake them up in a box and it's still pretty clear what's there. If you have a machine with 10,000 parts and you shake them up in a box, what you have is a box of junk.

We call for night to hide our acts, But Night, a god, gives God the facts.

I don't think he hates in the way we understand it. Or for that matter, that he loves. He wants to manipulate everything he comes upon, to change it with his will. And since tearing down is easier than building, that's what he does most often.

The world is filled half with evil and half with good. We can tilt it forward so that more good runs into our minds, or back, so that more runs into this.

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

Here Rose the Graced, not Rose the Chaste, reposes; The scent that rises is no scent of roses.

The forest had set its own dead there as well, stumps and limbs that time had turned to stone, so that I wondered as I descended, if it might not be that Urth is not, as we assume, older than her daughters the trees, and imagined them growing in the emptiness before the face of the sun, tree clinging to tree with tangled roots and interlacing twigs until at last their accumulation became our Urth, and they only the nap of her garment.

A]n angel is often only a demon who stands between us and our enemy.