Quotes from Gene Wolfe

As I stared into the fire, it seemed more possible than I would have liked to believe that someday, perhaps after a blow on the head, perhaps for no discernable cause, my imagination and my reason might reverse their places—just as two friends who come every day to the same seats in some public garden might at last decide for novelty's sake to exchange them.

Don't nobody ever want it to rain," the nearest of the sellers of beasts remarked philosophically, "but everybody wants to go on eatin'.

It's a pity you are a torturer," Ultan said. "You might have been a philosopher.

He said I had been touched by a god, and that I am a holy man. I said, "If I have been touched by a god, it was only to curse me." He nodded. "All who are touched by gods are holy.

There is no wonder, no amazement, quite like that felt when something supposed for amusement's sake to be magical and mysterious actually manifests the properties imagination has assigned it in jest--when the toy pistol shoots real bullets, the wishing well grants actual wishes, lovers from down the street fling themselves into Death's bright arms from Lovers' Leap

If a man bullies a woman, all the women turn against him. Then the other men mock him because he sleeps alone.

I waded out of the sea while loving it still, even as I had earlier dropped from the stars while loving them; and in truth there is no place in Briah that is not lovely when it no longer holds the threat of death, save for the places men have made so.

Before I had so much as opened any of the other volumes, I felt that pressure of time that is perhaps the surest indication we have left childhood behind.

If you know anything of science, madame, you must know that water is but ice given energy.

He paused, and I knew he was delving again in a mind larger and darker than even his great library.

It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile. That is why I have begun this account of it with the aftermath of our swim, in which I, the torturer's apprentice Severian, had so nearly drowned.

I had turned my mind from my survival just as a man suffering from a deadly sickness manages by a thousand tricks never to look at death squarely; or rather, 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.

Consciousness came and went. Consciousness went and came like the errant winds of spring, and I, who so often have had difficulty in falling asleep among the besieging shades of memory, now fought to stay awake as a child struggles to lift a faltering kite by the string.

This is what mankind has always wanted... that the environment should respond to human thought. That is the core of magic and the oldest dream of mankind, and, here on me, it is fact.

the progress of science depends much less upon either theoretical considerations or systematic investigation than is commonly believed, but rather on the transmittal of reliable information, gained by chance or insight, from one set of men to their successors.

In our commercial society, one may set one's price as high as one wishes, but to refuse to sell at any price is treason.

To be cursed by a god is to be touched by a god. To be touched by any god is to share divinity in some small measure. When the high priest leaves the sanctuary he strips off his clothing and bathes. Did you know that? His clothing is burned." I

We can think only of creatures, of things He's made. Creatures are all we know, and can be all we know until we know Him. When we think of Him like that, we find we can't believe. He can't be like a creature any more than a carpenter is like a table.

Even a man who courts a maid thinking he has no rivals has one, and that one is herself. She may give herself to him, but she may also choose to keep herself for herself. He has to convince her that she will be happier with him than by herself, and though men convince maids of that often, it isn't often true.

It had become the face of a scholar of the worst kind, of the sort of man who has studied many things hidden from common men and grown wise and corrupt. He

The chief thing is to begin, after all—after which the chief thing is to finish.

Only the solitary may see the gods," the giant told me. "For the rest, every god is the Unknown God.

There is something in all of us that has always been dead," I said. "If only because we know that eventually we will die. All of us except the smallest children.

One can't found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction.