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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
Read
Suppose
Found
Enjoyed
Young
Began
Ever
Struggle
Book
Books
Years
Pleasure
Narrowed
Time
Year
Struggling
People
Reading
Followed

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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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All the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive.
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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.
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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
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All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
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What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
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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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Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.
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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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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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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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People don't want other people to be people.
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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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There is no limit to stupidity. - Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.
Gene Wolfe
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Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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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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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.
Gene Wolfe