Gene Wolfe Quotes

People who fear death live no longer than those who don't, and live scared.

What is perceived is dictated by the instrument. If you had other eyes, or another mind, you would see all things otherwise.

No man has a home unless he is master of a place where he must please no one—a place where he can go and lock the door behind him.

Until we reach the end of time, we don’t know whether something’s been good or bad; we can only judge the intentions of those who acted.

Every theory is true in some discipline. The beauty of this is that it carries its own confirmation.

You have need of learning, children, in order that the whorl will someday have need of you.

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

The same critics who spend hundreds of pages discussing various peculiarities of the author's supposed nature often devote none to that much more significant person, the reader for whom he wrote. [...] It is a failure that disqualifies a great deal of head-scratching and hypothesizing. It amounts to saying that the letter is more important than its recipient, the signal more important than the changing image created from it, the bait more important than the fish.

I pledged myself to show you wonders."
I drew her farther from the building. "I'm not ready to see wonders. Yours, or any other woman's.

Experience is a wonderful teacher, but one whose lessons come too late.

We can dive to the bottom of the sea and some say NASA will fly us to the stars, and I have known men to plunge into the past—or the future—and drown. But there's one place where we can't go. We can't go where we are already. We can't go home, because our minds, and our hearts, and our immortal souls are already there.

Time passed, slipping through the waist of the universe's great hourglass like the eroded soil of this continent slipping down her rivers to the seas.

Prince of parable, I desire to see those gardens of lasting delight which Allah—the Creator! the Ever Beneficent!—reserves for the faithful. How am I to do so if I tell lies?"
"By lying to Allah, I suppose.

It’s easy—very easy—to slay a ruler. But it’s very difficult to prevent a worse one from coming to his place.

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