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

More quotes by Gene Wolfe

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What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
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When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
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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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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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I get a lot of people complaining about my ambiguity, often in cases which there is nothing ambigous at all. As far as I can see, people read it when they were half stoned and listening to the TV. Then they come back and say gee, it's impossible to figure out what's going on in a story.
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God is the nest we build together.
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Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
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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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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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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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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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Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
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That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
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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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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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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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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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People don't want other people to be people.
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...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
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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.
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