Gene Wolfe Reference Quotes

The Whorl, whose inhabitants keep watch for an outsider ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something. ~ Gene Wolfe

By slow degrees, a feeling of disquiet seized me. I was miserable before I knew I was no longer happy, and bowed with responsibility when I did not yet fully understand I held it. ~ Gene Wolfe

The experienced feel love or desire, or both. The inexperienced are sick with a thousand feelings, most of them unformed: fearful that they may be unable to love or to inspire love; fearful of what they may do if once they allow their emotions to carry them away; fearful that they may be unable to cut the cord that binds them still to the superficial affections of childhood; longing for adventure and yet unable to see that their adventure is in the present, that there will soon be nothing left but love and desire. ~ Gene Wolfe

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. ~ Gene Wolfe

People don't want other people to be people. ~ Gene Wolfe

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. ~ Gene Wolfe

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

I have seldom found a lot to love about my fellow human beings, even when I liked them; ~ Gene Wolfe

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") ~ Gene Wolfe

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. ~ Gene Wolfe

Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past. ~ Gene Wolfe

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

Necromancy?" The mantis shook his head. "I have laid a ghost or two, and I questioned one once." He swirled the wine in his cup and peered into it, seeing more in the flickers of firelight reflected there than I would have, I think. At last he said, "Our ghosts are becoming worse, have you noticed? It used to be they were no more than lost souls who had wandered away from the Lands of the Dead, or perhaps never reached them, spirits no worse dead than they had been alive, and frequently better. Such were the ghosts of which my masters told me when I was younger; such, indeed, were those I myself encountered as a young man. Now something evil is moving among them. ~ Gene Wolfe

You must know the story of how the race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away all the wild half of themselves to do so, so that they no longer cared for the taste of the pale wind, no for love or lust, nor to make new songs nor to sing old ones, nor for any of the other animal things they believed they had brought with them out of the rain forests al the bottom of time
though in fact, so my uncle told me, those things brought them ~ Gene Wolfe

All time exists. That is the truth ... If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind? ~ Gene Wolfe

I have a bird. Inside." She patted the flat stomach below her small breasts, and for a moment Nicholas thought she had really found food. "She sits in here. She has tangled a nest in my entrails, where she sits and tears at my breath with her beak. I look healthy to you, don't I? But inside I'm hollow and rotten and turning brown, dirt and old feathers, oozing away. Her beak will break through soon. ~ Gene Wolfe

The brown book I carry says there is nothing stranger than to explore a city wholly different from all those one knows, since to do so is to explore a second and unsuspected self. I have found a thing stranger: to explore such a city only after one has lived in it for some time without learning anything of it. ~ Gene Wolfe

All those who teach are hated. ~ Gene Wolfe

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life - they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all. ~ Gene Wolfe

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night, Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to. Flight. ~ Gene Wolfe

We talk of strong personalities, and they are strong, until the not-every-day when we see them as we might see one woman alone in a desert, and know that all the strength we thought we knew was only courage, only her lone song echoing among the stones; and then at last when we have understood this and made up our minds to hear the song and admire its courage and its sweetness, we wait for the next note and it does not come. The last word, with its pure tone, echoes and fades and is gone, and we realize - only then - that we do not know what it was, that we have been too intent on the melody to hear even one word. We go then to find the singer, thinking she will be standing where we last saw her. There are only bones and sand and a few faded rags. ~ Gene Wolfe

The plain shiprock walls, and the painted statue of Lord Pas (from which the paint was peeling) will remain with me until the day I die, always somewhat colored by the wonder I felt as a small boy at seeing a black cock struggling in the old man's hands after he had cut its throat, its wings beating frantically, beating as if they might live after all, live somehow somewhere, if only they could spray the whole place with blood before they ~ Gene Wolfe

You can't order the waves to be silent, madame," Baldanders told her. "They are coming, and they are bitter with salt. ~ Gene Wolfe

And what of the dead? I own that I thought of myself, at times, almost as dead. Are they not locked below ground in chambers smaller than mine was, in their millions of millions? 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. Their bodies repose in caskets, in sarcophagi, beneath arches of rude stone, everywhere under the earth. Their spirits haunt our minds, ears pressed to the bones of our foreheads. Who can say how intently they listen as we speak, or for what word? ~ Gene Wolfe

Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it. ~ Gene Wolfe

And yet I loved her still, or would have loved her if I could. ~ Gene Wolfe

The best offense is a good defense, but a bad defense is offensive. ~ Gene Wolfe

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. ~ Gene Wolfe

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. ~ Gene Wolfe

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. ~ Gene Wolfe

. . .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. ~ Gene Wolfe

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. ~ Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning ~ Michael Swanwick

It is a part of our office to stand uncloaked, masked, sword bared, upon the scaffold for a long time before the client is brought out. Some say this is to symbolize the unsleeping omnipresence of justice, but I believe the real reason is to give the crowd a focus, and the feeling that something is about to take place. A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart. Before the Hall of Justice, a ring of dimarchi surrounded the scaffold with their lances, and the pistol their officer carried could, I suppose, have killed fifty or sixty before someone could snatch it from him and knock him to the cobblestones to die. Still it is better to have a focus, and some open symbol of power.
Wolfe, Gene (1994-10-15). Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun' (p. 184). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition. ~ Gene Wolfe

Catch Catodon ... cast out his conation. ~ Gene Wolfe

It has been remarked thousands of times that Christ died under torture. Many of us have read so often that he was a "humble carpenter" that we feel a little surge of nausea on seeing the words yet again. But no one ever seems to notice that the instruments of torture were wood, nails, and a hammer; that the man who built the cross was undoubtedly a carpenter too; that the man who hammered in the nails was as much a carpenter as a soldier, as much a carpenter as a torturer. Very few seem even to have noticed that although Christ was a "humble carpenter," the only object we are specifically told he made was not a table or a chair, but a whip. ~ Gene Wolfe

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. ~ Gene Wolfe

Dorcas's skin was flecked with little golden freckles, and she was so slender that I was always aware of her bones; yet she was more desirable in her imperfections than Jolenta had ever been in the lushness of her flesh. ~ Gene Wolfe

It is well, I think, for us to learn to tell evil from good; but it has its price, as everything does. We leave our evil friend behind. ~ Gene Wolfe

It was a woman, naked and not long dead. Her staring eyes still showed traces of kohl; her teeth gleamed faintly through half-parted lips. He tried to judge her as he had judged the women whose compliance he had secured for coins, to weigh her breasts with his eyes and applaud or condemn the roundness of her belly; he discovered that he could not do so, that in the way he sought to see her she was beyond his sight, unreachable as the unborn, unreachable as his mother had been when he had once, as a boy, happened upon her bathing. Eata's ~ Gene Wolfe

A web of chain mail, linked rings each flattened where the ends met and clinched with a tiny rivet, rattled about his knees. Mark felt the fine powdering of rust that fell from the rings. It was green. The rings had turned to greenness in their decay, as herbs did in health. Where the greenness had fallen away, the knees beating it out slowly like fine green snow, the metal was hot and bright and yellow. It began to chime when the green decay was gone; gongs struck by imperious lords in their tens of thousands, calling their servitors to battle with demanding yellow sound. A ~ Gene Wolfe

When we are asleep, so it seems to me, we sleep surrounded by all the years. I have imagined, sleeping, that I heard the footsteps of the long-dead; I have held conversations with them, and with the blank-faced people I was yet to meet, conversations that seemed of unbearable poignancy, though when I woke I could remember only a few words, and those not words that possessed, waking, any emotional significance to me. It is said that this is because content is divorced from emotion in sleep, as though the sleeping mind read two books at once, one of tears and lust and laughter, the other words and phrases picked up from old newspapers, from grimy handbills blowing along the street and conversations overheard in barbershops and bars, and the banalities of radio. I think rather that we have forgotten on waking what the words have meant to us, or have not learned as yet what they will mean. But the worst thing is to wake and remember that we have been talking to the dead, having never thought to hear that voice again, having never any expectation of hearing it again before we ourselves are gone. ~ Gene Wolfe

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. ~ Gene Wolfe

You're a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism doesn't make materialism true. Don't you know that? In the final summing up, it is spirit and dream, thought and love and act that matter. ~ Gene Wolfe

Once I saw torches with dancing flames of scarlet and radiant gold held by solemn apes. A man with the horns and muzzled face of a bull bent over me, a constellation sprung to life. I spoke to him and found myself telling him that I was unsure of the precise date of my birth, that if his benign spirit of meadow and unfeigning force had governed my life I thanked him for it; then remembered that I knew the date, that my father had given a ball for me each year until his death, that it fell under the Swan. He listened intently, turning his head to watch me from one brown eye. ~ Gene Wolfe

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

It is evil," the Old Wise One said. "For very long we have walked carefree in the only paradise. It would be better if all here were to die." The last Shadow child said firmly, "Nothing is worse than that I should die," and something that had wrapped the world was gone. ~ Gene Wolfe