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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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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
Still
Lays
Long
Brought
Men
Wine
Spring
Lives
Stupefied
Death
Alcoholism
Past
Springs
Stills
Drank

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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
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All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
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Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
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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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...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
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...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
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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.
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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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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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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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