Quote

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

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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
Moving
Rise
Place
Move
Hands
Hand
Pawn
Much
Situation
Pawns
Men
Lasts
Sword
Think
Last
Armor
Thinking
Actually
Board
Life
Woman
Boards

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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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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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...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
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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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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.
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All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
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Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
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Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
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When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
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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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That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
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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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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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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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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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What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
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My whole life experience feeds into my writing. I think that must be true for every writer. Clearly the Army and combat were major influences just the same, you need to understand that many of the writers we have now couldn't load a revolver.
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