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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

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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
Venture
Helping
Singing
Heels
Thought
Whose
Mask
Think
Perhaps
Crickets
Thinking
Hear
Clever
Smash
Wonder
Gods
Masks
Pleasure
Jokes
Wondering
Though
Watching
Cricket
Help
Sight

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Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
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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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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.
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...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
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Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
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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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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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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?
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When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
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People don't want other people to be people.
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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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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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There is no limit to stupidity. - Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.
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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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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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Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.
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You seem to think that the only genuine existence evil can have is conscious existence - that no one is evil unless he admits it to himself. I disagree.
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All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
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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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...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
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