Gene Wolfe
Gene Wolfe
Gene Rodman Wolfeis an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He is noted for his dense, allusive prose as well as the strong influence of his Catholic faith. He is a prolific short-story writer and novelist and has won many science fiction and fantasy literary awards...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 May 1931
CountryUnited States of America
echoes half mist
Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
life wise men
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.
men desire said
Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
magic
There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.
reality psychological mechanism
Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
book men wind
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.
pain rain justice
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.
real believe mind
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.
talking humanity
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.
dog thinking color
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.
writing two stories
Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.
children grandmother past
One can't found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction. Look at the great successes of the past--they say their deities are the masters of all the universes, and yet that they require grandmothers to defend them, as if they were children frightened by poultry. Or that the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become the better for it.
beautiful art children
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.
believe thinking talking
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.