Nobody bothers crazy people. […] In the end, maybe it’s the crazy people who win after all.
—Gene Wolfe
A hundred wise men have said in various ways that love transcends the power of death, and millions of fools have supposed that they meant nothing by it. At this late hour in my life I have learned what they meant. They meant that love transcends death. They are correct.
—Gene Wolfe
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 there.
—Gene Wolfe
It is well not to spend one’s symbols improvidently.
—Gene Wolfe
A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what is commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice, and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.
—Gene Wolfe
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.
—Gene Wolfe
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.
—Gene Wolfe
We are but dreams, and dreams possess no life by their own right.
—Gene Wolfe
Topics: Rationality
There is no human quality more attractive than the courage of the weak.
—Gene Wolfe
The true dawn of adulthood, of intellectual maturity, if you like, is the realization that adults are all fools.
—Gene Wolfe
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.
—Gene Wolfe
The best way to be thought honest is to be honest.
—Gene Wolfe
Paradoxes explain everything. Since they do, they cannot be explained.
—Gene Wolfe
The most trivial skirmish is not trivial to those who die in it, and so should not be trivial in any ultimate sense to us.
—Gene Wolfe
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.
—Gene Wolfe
There is more to be learned from any good teacher than the subject taught.
—Gene Wolfe
Experience is a wonderful teacher, but one whose lessons come too late.
—Gene Wolfe
Adolescents are simply those people who haven’t as yet chosen between childhood and adulthood. For as long as anyone tries to hold on to the advantages of childhood—the freedom from responsibility, principally—while seeking to lay claim to the best parts of adulthood, such as independence, he is an adolescent. […] Eventually most people choose to be adults, or are forced into it. A very few retreat into childhood and never leave it again. A large number remain adolescents for life.
—Gene Wolfe
Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men’s threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.
—Gene Wolfe
I have never in my whole life had a fight with a smart person or even seen anybody else have one either. That is because when the fight starts the smart people are not there anymore. They have gone off someplace else, and when it is over they come back and tell you how much they did in the fight, only it is all lies.
—Gene Wolfe
One of the questions whose answers we seek is why we seek.
—Gene Wolfe
There are people who love birds so much they free them. There are others who love them so much they cage them.
—Gene Wolfe
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.
—Gene Wolfe
People who wish to be lost always get their way.
—Gene Wolfe
Whenever a man and a woman come to words or blows, fools are quick to attribute it to the differences between the sexes. The sexes differ much less than they wish to believe, and such differences as are real tend less to promote strife than to prevent it.
—Gene Wolfe
People who fear death live no longer than those who don’t, and live scared.
—Gene Wolfe
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Andre Norton American Science Fiction Writer
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Lloyd Alexander American Writer
- Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
- Russell Hoban American Author
- Orson Scott Card American Author
- Jonathan Lethem American Novelist, Essayist
- Raymond Chandler American Novelist
- George R. R. Martin American Writer
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