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That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.

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
Unforgivable
Remains
Sin
Capable

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When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
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Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
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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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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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God is the nest we build together.
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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
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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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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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All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
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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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Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
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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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...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
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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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What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
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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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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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People don't want other people to be people.
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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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