Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Gene Wolfe

Image
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
Image
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
Image
All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
Gene Wolfe
Image
We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.
Gene Wolfe
Image
What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
Gene Wolfe
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
Gene Wolfe
Image
That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
Gene Wolfe
Image
Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
Gene Wolfe
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
Gene Wolfe
Image
Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
Gene Wolfe
Image
God is the nest we build together.
Gene Wolfe
Image
...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
Gene Wolfe
Image
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.
Gene Wolfe
Image
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
Image
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.
Gene Wolfe
Image
Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
Gene Wolfe