Quotes from Gene Wolfe

There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men—all are dead.

But I was awake, sitting by the window looking down at the trailer and Mr. Zoltan's truck. I could not sleep. That is how it is with folks my age. We take naps during the day, and then we cannot sleep at night. I think that it is because God is getting us ready for the grave. Is that right? Did He ever tell you? (The Little Stranger)

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

A legend, a lie, and a likelihood make a tradition'?

The hope in her voice now made me think of a flower growing in shadow.

In the final reckoning there is only love, only that divinity. That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.

Lois had gone out of my life (I should say that she had left my future—I could never eradicate her from my past, no matter how hard I tried)

He was a rich man—richer, I think, than Mr. Macafee—and like most rich men he had nothing distinctive about him, the money having assumed for him the task of self-expression that, in poorer men, is assumed by the personality;

our lives couldn't be viewed with detachment until they were half forgotten, like paintings which can be seen objectively only when the artists are long dead

Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize.

powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.

There are encounters that change nothing. Urth turns her aged face to the sun and he beams upon her snows; they scintillate and coruscate until each little point of ice hanging from the swelling sides of the towers seems the Claw of the Conciliator, the most precious of gems. Then everyone except the wisest believes that the snow must melt and give way to a protracted summer beyond summer.

I am filthy. So is Doris, but we'll bathe and change clothes and be clean. Your filth is within you. If it were gone, you'd collapse.

The pool and the miniature vale that contained it, always dark, grew darker still. Looking up after countless kisses, he saw idling fish of mottled gold and silver, black, white, and red, hanging in air above the goddess's upraised hand, and for the first time noticed light streaming from a lamp of silver filigree in the branches of a stunted tree. "Where did they go?" he asked.

Feels good, this time of year," he said. "The sun's dead and don't know it yet, but we do. If you're killed, you'll get to miss next winter, and if you're hurt bad, you'll get to stay inside. That's what I always tell them. Of course, most of the fights are around midsummer's eve, so it's more appropriate then, so to speak. I don't know if it comforts them or not, but it does no harm.

How big is a man's life? asked Ultan. I have no way of knowing, but isn't it larger than that? You see it from the beginning, and anticipate much. I, recollecting it from its termination, know how little there has been. I suppose that is why the depraved creatures who devour the bodies of the dead seek more.

And then I saw it—not below, where I had looked, but over my head, a vast and noble curve stretching away to either side, with white cloud flying between ourselves and it, a world all speckled over with blue and green like the egg of a wild bird.

For years I had known joy in nothing but victories, and now I felt myself a boy again. When I had wished to climb the Great Keep, it had never occurred to me that the Great Keep itself might wish to climb the sky; I knew better now. But this ship at least was climbing beyond the sky, and I wanted to climb with her.

The Pancreator is infinitely far from us, the angel said. And thus infinitely far from me, through I fly so much higher than you. I guess at his desires--no one can do otherwise.

His eyes say quite plainly that he once trusted someone, that he has been repenting it for longer than you or I have been alive, and that he will never take the chance again.

I nodded and grasped the woman by the arm; the cataphracts released her and turned away like silver automata.

She smiled the infinitely kind smile of a woman who will not do what you ask.

You have understood me better than I wanted, as the man said when he looked in the mirror.

The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just as the momentous events of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when the sun is drawing toward the dark,our own shadows race into the past to trouble mankind's dreams.