59+ Gene Wolfe Quotes On Nature, Blue's Waters And Tolkien

Gene Wolfe is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He is best known for his four-volume series The Book of the New Sun, which won him numerous awards. He has also written numerous short stories and novels, and is considered one of the most important writers in the genre. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Gene Wolfe on life, leadership, nature.

Top 10 Gene Wolfe Quotes

1. People don't want other people to be people.
2. Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.
3. Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
4. My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.
5. Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt that thematic closure is never attainable.
6. Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.
7. 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.
8. That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
9. Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• ...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
• Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
• God is the nest we build together.
• What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
• ...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
• Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
• All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
• When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
• Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers.
• You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

Gene Wolfe Quotes About Life

My whole life experience feeds into my writing. I think that must be true for every writer. Clearly the Army and combat were major influences; just the same, you need to understand that many of the writers we have now couldn't load a revolver. — Gene Wolfe

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. — Gene Wolfe

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. — Gene Wolfe

That was when I found out that the best way in the world to make yourself feel better when you have hit bottom is to try to get somebody else to feel better. There are certain things in life that are truly worth knowing, and that is one of the big ones. — Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe Quotes About Read

I have read only the first 'Harry Potter' book. I thought it excellent, perhaps the best thing written for older children since The Hobbit. I wish the books had been around when my kids were the right age for them. — Gene Wolfe

Whether the medium is ready for consumers is better judged by those consumers. I sometimes read online - but not often. The stigma is attached to pay scales. Much online publication is no pay or small pay. — Gene Wolfe

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. — Gene Wolfe

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. — Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe Quotes About Stories

Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other. — Gene Wolfe

Online publication is fine with me, in part because I hope to collect those stories later. — Gene Wolfe

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. — Gene Wolfe

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. — Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe Famous Quotes And Sayings

Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it. — Gene Wolfe

It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual. — Gene Wolfe

So powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us. — Gene Wolfe

Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. — Gene Wolfe

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. — Gene Wolfe

Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be. — Gene Wolfe

When a client is driven to the utmost extremity, it is warmth and food and ease from pain he wants. Peace and justice come afterward. Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize. — Gene Wolfe

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. — Gene Wolfe

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

All of us... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak. — Gene Wolfe

You do not characterize by telling the reader about the character. You do it by showing the character thinking, speaking and acting in a characteristic way. You simply show it and shut up. — Gene Wolfe

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

We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons. — Gene Wolfe

He's not rewarding us by talking to us. He's talking to us because He has something to say to us directly, as opposed to the things He says to all humanity. — Gene Wolfe

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. — Gene Wolfe

You're a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism doesn't make materialism true. Don't you know that? In the final summing up, it is spirit and dream, thought and love and act that matter. — Gene Wolfe

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. — Gene Wolfe

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

I was trapped in admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the captive of some long-vanished pine. — Gene Wolfe

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death. — Gene Wolfe

There is no limit to stupidity. - Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity. — Gene Wolfe

Some writers say they cannot write in front of a window; many say they cannot function without almost perfect quiet. A writer with only two hours a day can write in the back of an open truck on the Interstate. — Gene Wolfe

No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death - every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence. — Gene Wolfe

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? — Gene Wolfe

There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden. — Gene Wolfe

We choose--or choose not--to be alone when we decide whom we will accept as our fellows, and whom we will reject. Thus an eremite in a mountain is in company, because the birds and coneys, the initiates whose words live in his 'forest books,' and the winds--the messengers of the Increate--are his companions. Another man, living in the midst of millions, may be alone, because there are none but enemies and victims around him. — Gene Wolfe

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. — Gene Wolfe

Life Lessons by Gene Wolfe

1. Gene Wolfe's work teaches us to appreciate the complexity and nuance of language, as well as the power of storytelling to capture the human experience.
2. His stories often challenge readers to think critically and consider multiple perspectives, encouraging us to explore the depths of our own minds.
3. By exploring themes of morality, identity, and the nature of reality, Wolfe encourages us to reflect on our own values and beliefs.