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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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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
American
Voice
Youthful
House
Challenging
Around
Particularly
School
Walk
Young
Walks
Challenges
High

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Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
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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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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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Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.
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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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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
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...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
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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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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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What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
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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.
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That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
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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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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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When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
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God is the nest we build together.
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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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All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
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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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