Quotes by Gene Wolfe

“Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.”

“People don't want other people to be people.”

“It seems to me that you can almost define civilization by saying it's people who are not willing to hurt other people because the other people are different.”

“Time turns our lies into truths.”

“And what of the dead? I own that I thought of myself, at times, almost as dead. Are they not locked below ground in chambers smaller than mine was, in their millions of millions? There is no catego...”

“There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume work from a short story, a novel, or a series. The ending of the final volume should leave the reader with the feeling that he ...”

“Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.”

“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.”

“There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.”

“Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle science fiction.”

“You believe me wise because I taught you once, but I have not been north, as you have. You have seen (what) I have never seen...You flatter me by asking my opinion.”

“Master Palaemon's hand, dry and wrinkled as a mummy's, groped until it found mine. "Among the initiates of religion it is said, 'You are an epopt always.' The reference is not only to knowledge but...”

“We can think only of creatures, of things He's made. Creatures are all we know, and can be all we know until we know Him. When we think of Him like that, we find we can't believe. He can't be like ...”

“My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.”

“The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just as the momentous events of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when the sun is draw...”

“I was miserable before I knew I was no longer happy”

“... I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describebut it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, ...”

“Just as the room of the Inquisitor in Dr. Talos's play, with its high judicial bench, lurked somewhere at the lowest level of the House Absolute, so we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of ou...”

“And as if by magic - and it may have been magic, for I believe America is the land of magic, and that we, we now past Americans, were once the magical people of it, waiting now to stand to some ung...”

“Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude char...”