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

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

More quotes by 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 rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
Gene Wolfe
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...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
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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Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
Gene Wolfe
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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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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.
Gene Wolfe
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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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God is the nest we build together.
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
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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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Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
Gene Wolfe
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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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People don't want other people to be people.
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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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.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
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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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