Gene Wolfe Quotes

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

He was proud, like all lonely men. Lonely men must be proud or die.

Some are haunted by ghosts. I am haunted by stories.

What I would like to know is what I should be doing." "I see what you mean," Freeling said, "but I'm afraid I can't tell you. If you were a lathe operator I'd say make that part, but you're a part of management, and you can't treat managerial people that way." "Go ahead," Forlesen told him. "I won't mind." [...] "What I meant was that if I knew what you ought to be doing I'd hire a clerk to do it. You're where you are because we feel—rightly or wrongly—that you can find your own work, recognize it when you see it, and do it or get somebody else to. Just make damn sure you don't step on anybody's toes while you're doing it, and don't make more trouble than you fix. [...] Don't come running to me with complaints, and don't let me get any complaints about you. Now what was it you wanted to see me about?" "I don't," Forlesen said. "You said you wanted to see me." "Oh. Well, I'm through.

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.

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

Action, you see, is the end that thought achieves. Action is its only purpose. What else is it good for? If we don't act, it's worthless.

The gods smile on us, my son, or so it is written. It's a wonder they don't laugh aloud.

We don't harm the gods when we mingle their names with our curses and obscenities. We harm ourselves. I said that I didn't regard most gods as holy, but they don't have to be for our malice and mockery to recoil upon ourselves.

We may be damned at last, by God or our consciences; and though I've met a good many people who profess to credit no God, I've never met one who believed he had no conscience—this though he could no more produce it for my inspection than I could point out the God he demanded to see.

He is indeed a creature of evil; but so are you, and so am I.

There is no human quality more attractive than the courage of the weak.

The jokes of the gods are long in the telling.

Now I must, I suppose, explain why I have been writing this account. [...] I have written to disclose myself to myself, and I am writing now because I will, I know, sometime read what I am now writing and wonder. Perhaps by the time I do, I will have solved the mystery of myself, or perhaps I will no longer care to know the solution.

That the environment should respond to human thought. That is the core of magic and the oldest dream of mankind.