Quotes from Gene Wolfe

As children we have no appreciation of scenery because, having not yet stored similar scenes in our imagination, with their attendant emotions and circumstances, we perceive it without psychic depth. I now looked at the cloudcrowned summits with my

We would be blind, Auk. As blind as I. Because I have never had eyes of my own, I could not look out through yours. But I shall go with you, and guide you, and use your body to heal you, if I can. Look upon me, Auk." "There's nothing to see," Auk protested. But there was: a stammering light so filled with hope and pleasure and wonder that Auk would willingly have seen nothing else, if only he could have watched it forever.

She sighed, and all the gladness went out of her face, as the sunlight leaves the stone where a beggar seeks to warm himself.

All this and much else besides, lovely and appalling, blood red and living green, yellow, blue, white, and velvet black, with minglings of other colors and of colors he had never known.

Gold is the kindest of all hosts when it shines in the sky, but comes as an evil guest to those who receive it in the hand.

By the use of the language of sorrow I had for the time being obliterated my sorrow—so powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.

From the top of the ramp he looked back and saw them go, their glasses crashing to the flagstoned paths and brick paved patios, their cigarettes dropping like poisoned fireflies. "I loved you," the girl said. "Or at least I liked you. You'll be gone in a moment and I can't even ask you to kiss me, because I'm going to be sick." "We're still here," John Edward told her, "both of us." And she was gone.

Honesty, integrity, and intelligence cannot be kept down.

He is the oldest of our sons, and although I loved him, I did not like him.

The past stood at my shoulder, naked and defenseless as all dead things, as though it were time itself that had been laid open by the fall of the mountain.

I was young, so that I desired high things only.

Here I pause. If you wish to walk no farther with me, reader, I do not blame you. It is no easy road.

Nations are like men—growing old, never young. My son had the misfortune to be a young man of an old nation.

I love you, but you are another death, a death that has stayed with me and befriended me as the old death in the lake did, but death all the same.

Possibly I was mistaken, but it seemed to me that he went pale. At last he muttered, "It isn't much of a ghost story, I'm afraid, but then I didn't make it up.

I had a professor in medical school who used to say, 'Happy is the man who has found his work—but of course the addict who has found a quart jar of heroin is happy, too.' One kind of addiction is approved by society, Mr. Weer, and the other is not, but both destroy their victims.

One ought to drink, I think, when one is cheerful already. Otherwise nothing but more sorrow is poured into the cup.

if a pauper were to leap from the parapet of this bridge each time we draw breath, we should live forever, because the city breeds and breaks men faster than we respire.

If we could have our way, no man would have to go roving or draw blood. But women did not make the world. All of you are torturers, one way or another.

My teeth warred in my mouth, the teeth above against the teeth below.

A knife with a worn blade and a cracked wooden handle lay at his feet. Reflexively, he bent to pick it up, and recoiled from it as if from a coiled snake. Something screamed in the emptiness, something deeper than resentment and thoughts of water, food, and healing. He backed away from the knife and stumbled through the open door into the darkest night ever known.     We

No quarter will be given," he told me. "Do you understand?" I said that I did not think I could kill a man who begged me for his life, but I would try.

You claim the right to prosecute me in accordance with your laws, the laws of Dorp, about which I know nothing. I claim the right to defend myself by the only law I know, the law of reason. Reason demands an impartial judge, and that I be given the advice of someone who knows your law.

You're old when your dreams become regrets