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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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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
Truth
Exist
Doe
Behinds
Still
Journey
Time
Behind
Leave
Future
Past
Exists
Stills
Toward

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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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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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People don't want other people to be people.
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Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
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...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
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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 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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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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Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.
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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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When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
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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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Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
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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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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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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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