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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

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
External
Psychological
Hope
Reality
Unaffected
Realities
Mechanism

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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 have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.
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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 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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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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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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Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
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...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
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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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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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That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
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God is the nest we build together.
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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.
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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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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 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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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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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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Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
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