Gene Wolfe Quotes

Be careful about extending credit, too, and doubly careful about refusing to extend it.

It will help her if she wants to be helped; if she insists on clasping her illness to her it will not.

People who get eyeball arthritis see only what they're supposed to see, like that TV screen.

You have a walking stick. Suppose it could walk by itself, and that it chose to walk away from you. [...] It would no longer be a walking stick at all, only a stick that walked.

This, then, is the new illiteracy, the illiteracy of those who can read but don't. [...] This new illiteracy is more pernicious than the old, because unlike the old illiteracy it does not debar its victims from power and influence, although like the old illiteracy it disqualifies them for it. Those long-dead men and women who learned to read so that they might read the Bible and John Bunyan would tell us that pride is the greatest of all sins, the father of sin. And the victims of the new illiteracy are proud of it. If you don't believe me, talk to them and see with what pride they trumpet their utter ignorance of any book you care to name.

Every so often I get optimistic and explain the best method of learning to write for students. I don't believe any of them has ever tried it.

Nobody bothers crazy people. [...] In the end, maybe it's the crazy people who win after all.

We never really got married. When we both wanted to we never had the money, somehow. And when we had the money, there was always some kind of quarrel. After a couple of years everybody thought we were married anyway.

There are people who love birds so much they free them. There are others who love them so much they cage them.

Most Christians know next to nothing about the life and teachings of Christ and are afraid to learn, sensing that the knowledge will upset their preconceptions.

When we're young, we notice things that are young, like ourselves. New grass on old graves. New leaves on old trees

The Falklands War continues to fascinate me. What a conflict! What an unlikely pair of antagonists! The British have always fought, to be sure. No nation on Earth can be taken seriously in historical circles unless it has had at least one war with the British; it's like not having an American Express card. And yet the very idea of Britain in a contemporary war is a shock. Britain, one feels, fights in history books and not on TV.

The jokes of the gods are long in the telling.

I was the core of the universe, as we always are to ourselves.

Everyone who is grieved at anything, or discontented, is like a pig for sacrifice, kicking and squealing. Like a dove for sacrifice is he who laments in silence. Our one distinction is that it is given to us to consent, if we will, to the necessity imposed upon us.