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Year followed struggling year for me, and all that time I read - I suppose few have ever read so. I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure.

Gene Wolfe

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Gene Wolfe
Age: 87 †
Born: 1931
Born: May 7
Died: 2019
Died: April 14
Editor
Mechanical Engineer
Military Engineer
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Gene Rodman Wolfe
Years
Pleasure
Narrowed
Time
Year
Struggling
People
Reading
Followed
Read
Suppose
Found
Enjoyed
Young
Began
Ever
Struggle
Book
Books

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We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.
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Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
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...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
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A youthful American voice isn't particularly challenging - I've been a young American, and they're all around me. I can walk from my house to Barrington High School.
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Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
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Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
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Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight.
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I get a lot of people complaining about my ambiguity, often in cases which there is nothing ambigous at all. As far as I can see, people read it when they were half stoned and listening to the TV. Then they come back and say gee, it's impossible to figure out what's going on in a story.
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There's a certain kind of lonely man who rejects love, because he believes that anyone who offers it wouldn't be a lover worth having.
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I don't think anyone is more intrinsically holy. People experience God in many ways and it seems to me that God does what the rest of us do: He chooses the means that best gets His message across.
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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.
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Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.
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We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.
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We think that we know a man or a woman, when so much of what we know is actually that man's or that woman's situation, his or her place on the board of life. Move the pawn to the last row and see her rise in armor, sword in hand.
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Do not start a story unless you have an ending in mind. You can change the story's ending if you wish, but you should always have a destination.
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Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.
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People don't want other people to be people.
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We only have one dog now. Calamity Jane had to be put down. She was very old, and her medicine no longer controlled her seizures. Dilly is five now, I think. He's a neutered American Pit Bull Terrier, very gentle, about the color of buckskin.
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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
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...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
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