Quote

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

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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
Child
Finds
Midway
Interest
Notice
Calmly
Two
Adults
Improbable
Light
Extraordinary
Accepts
Children
Consider
Incidents
Usually
Commonplace
Accepting
Lights
Knowing
Beneath
Occurrences

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Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
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People don't want other people to be people.
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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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What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
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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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God is the nest we build together.
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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.
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That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
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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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...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
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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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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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Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.
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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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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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...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
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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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Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
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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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When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
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