Quotes from Gene Wolfe

The gem, which he had supposed colorless, caught a ray of sunlight from the god-gate in the roof and flashed a watery green. For some reason, it reminded him of her eyes. He put it to his lips, his thoughts full of things that could never be.

Every woman is her true age when she sleeps.

That was a fine story," I told her, "one of the best that I've ever heard." "I had to live it," she replied, "and it is far better to hear such stories than to live them, I promise you, though it ended so happily.

But love is the last need a group has, not the first. If it were the first, there could be no such groups. Justice is the first need, the mortar that binds together a village or a town, or even a city. Or the crew of a boat. No one would take part in any such thing if he did not believe that he would be treated fairly.

He was a bad man, a bully and a thug, yet he was deeply religious in his way—I very much doubt that he would have made such a thing up. It was not his sort of lie, if you know what I mean.

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

We leave them to others. The day came when they stood at the right hand of the dwarf, with their feet upon sand and millet at their backs, and all three stood much taller than he. And upon that day he called across the desert to their mother. Small though he was, his voice was large, and held the pain of a thousand beatings and the pain of a lover who knows that love is past.

White sparks cascaded onto the trembling wick. It was as if there were shooting stars in his hands, like the stars at the bottom of the grave to which Silk and Hyacinth had driven Orpine's body in a dream he recalled with uncanny clarity. Here we dig holes in the ground for our dead, he thought, to bring them nearer the Outsider; and on Blue we do the same because we did it here, though it takes them away from him. The

Inside the silken tent, we knelt before a simple altar heaped with flowers. Ava prayed. I, knowing no prayers, spoke without sound to someone who seemed at times within me and at times, as the angel had said, infinitely remote.

Gurloes was one of the most complex men I have known, because he was a complex man trying to be simple. Not a simple, but a complex man's idea of simplicity.

If you don't know I can't tell you. Yes, I can; because I want to turn things around. Like, everybody all the time only does it for himself or something he sees being part of him only bigger, an empire or a church, like that. I'm doing it for ants, to set us loose." The bearded man said, "You stoned?" "Sure I'm stoned. Ken, I'm stoned blind." "You don't look stoned, man." "Trust me.

Somewhere—somewhere there had been peace. Turn the key the other way, and the dancers would dance backward, the music play backward, vanished nights reappear Ã¢â'¬Â¦

A young man seeks a woman and finds her and is great and dies to the world. Afterward he is never as great again, but the woman is a comfort to him, reminding him of the time that was, and he is a little again with her what once he was wholly.

Then it would be over. Over and dead and done with, never to live again. He would recall his longing as something that had once occupied an augur whose name chanced to be his, Silk, a name not common but by no means outlandish. (The old caldé, whose bust his mother had kept at the back of her closet, had been—what? Had he been Silk, too? No, Tussah; but tussah was another costly fabric.) He would try to bring peace and to save his manteion, fail at both, and die.

It was a cruel and lawless place without him, and it seems to me that it's better with him, if anything. A bad horse needs a big whip, as the saying goes.

If they are too quarrelsome to unite against him, and so violent that they'll willingly pay his taxes to be protected from one another, they have no reason to complain.

There have been many times when I have felt I have gone mad, for I have had many great adventures, and the greatest adventures are those that act most strongly upon our minds.

These chaps everyone's been shouting at to change things, they're the very chaps that do so well as things are. Think they're going to make new rules for a game they always win? Not ruddy likely.

Among you Medes, I'm told, there are many men so honorable that everyone trusts them. We're not like that at all—we never trust one another. So what we do instead is make sure that each side's represented, so that every rascal's got two worse looking over his shoulder.

True courtesy," he continued, "earns the name. It is courtesy that is truthful. When the plebeian kneels to the monarch, he is offering his neck. He offers it because he knows his ruler can take it if he wishes. Common people like that say-or rather, they used to say, in older and better times—that I have no love of truth. But the truth is that it is precisely truth that I love, an open acknowledgment of fact.

of all the good things in the world, the only ones humanity can claim for itself are stories and music;

Do you think there are answers to everything here? Is that true in the place you come from?

I take his gold. I'm hated for that by men who would grovel for it, were it offered to them." Myt-ser

We are the only government upon whose word every man may rely absolutely, and because of that we command infinite credit, infinite obedience, infinite respect If we say to anyone, "Do this and your reward will be such and such," there is no doubt in his mind that he will be rewarded. If we say villages breaking a certain ordinance will be burned to the ground, there is no doubt. We speak little, but every word drops like a weight of iron—