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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.

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
Believe
Shaped
Defining
Invent
Symbols
Edges
Creatures
Truth
Hard

More quotes by Gene Wolfe

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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.
Gene Wolfe
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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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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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...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
Gene Wolfe
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God is the nest we build together.
Gene Wolfe
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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?
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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I get a lot of people complaining about my ambiguity, often in cases which there is nothing ambigous at all. As far as I can see, people read it when they were half stoned and listening to the TV. Then they come back and say gee, it's impossible to figure out what's going on in a story.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
Gene Wolfe
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When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe