Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Gene Wolfe

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
Gene Wolfe
Image
That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
Gene Wolfe
Image
We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.
Gene Wolfe
Image
I could speculate, but it would be just speculation and the kind of thing that you would get in with a science fiction story. And if I was doing a science fiction story then I would come up with what can go wrong with this system.
Gene Wolfe
Image
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
Image
Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
Gene Wolfe
Image
There is no limit to stupidity. - Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.
Gene Wolfe
Image
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.
Gene Wolfe
Image
Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
Gene Wolfe
Image
Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
Gene Wolfe
Image
Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.
Gene Wolfe
Image
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.
Gene Wolfe
Image
All time exists. That is the truth.... If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind?
Gene Wolfe
Image
...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
Gene Wolfe
Image
All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
Gene Wolfe
Image
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.
Gene Wolfe
Image
We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.
Gene Wolfe