Gene Wolfe Quotes

PARADOX: A statement that reduces the matter at hand to complete obscurity while clarifying it. [...] Paradoxes are sensitive and can be routed by sneering.

As you intend to live hereafter, it is in your power to live here.

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.

One of the questions whose answers we seek is why we seek.

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.

He is not mad. He is only more clever than you. It is not the same.

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.

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

Do you know the story about the farmer who complained all his life about getting too much rain or too little, about the soil and the winds and so on? [...] The farmer died and went to Mainframe, and was soon called to the magnificent chamber in which Pas holds court. Pas said to him, "I understand you feel that I botched certain aspects of the job when I built the Whorl; and the farmer admitted it was so, saying, "Well, sir, pretty often I thought I could have made it better." To which Pas replied, "Yes, that's what I wanted you to do."

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.

It doesn't move because he has fastened it in place until he finds out why it doesn't move.

Very small, child, are the flying days of love, and men and women must catch them when they can, if they are to know love at all.

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

When a tree is very old, yet still lives, sometimes the limbs are strangely twisted.

Almost any interesting work of art comes close to saying the opposite of what it really says.