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

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Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
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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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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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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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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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That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
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What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
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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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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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God is the nest we build together.
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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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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.
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People don't want other people to be people.
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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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...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
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...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
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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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