Quotes from Gene Wolfe

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

There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

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

Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.

You seem to think that the only genuine existence evil can have is conscious existence - that no one is evil unless he admits it to himself. I disagree.

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

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

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.

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.

Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

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.

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

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.

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard defining edges.

That was when I found out that the best way in the world to make yourself feel better when you have hit bottom is to try to get somebody else to feel better. There are certain things in life that are truly worth knowing, and that is one of the big ones.

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.

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

Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.

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.

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

You seem to think that the only genuine existence evil can have is conscious existence - that no one is evil unless he admits it to himself. I disagree.

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.

He's not rewarding us by talking to us. He's talking to us because He has something to say to us directly, as opposed to the things He says to all humanity.