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Gene Wolfe: 204 quotes4 likes

“You have need of learning, children, in order that the whorl will someday have need of you.”

Volume 1, Ch. 2
Fiction, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996)

“Every theory is true in some discipline.
The beauty of this is that it carries its own confirmation.”

Gene Wolfe book Starwater Strains

"In Glory like Their Star", The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2001, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Starwater Strains (2005)
Fiction

“What I would like to know is what I should be doing."
"I see what you mean," Freeling said, "but I'm afraid I can't tell you. If you were a lathe operator I'd say make that part, but you're a part of management, and you can't treat managerial people that way."
"Go ahead," Forlesen told him. "I won't mind."
[…] "What I meant was that if I knew what you ought to be doing I'd hire a clerk to do it. You're where you are because we feel—rightly or wrongly—that you can find your own work, recognize it when you see it, and do it or get somebody else to. Just make damn sure you don't step on anybody's toes while you're doing it, and don't make more trouble than you fix. […] Don't come running to me with complaints, and don't let me get any complaints about you. Now what was it you wanted to see me about?"
"I don't," Forlesen said. "You said you wanted to see me.”

Gene Wolfe book Gene Wolfe's Book of Days

"Oh. Well, I'm through."
"Forlesen", Orbit 14 (1974), ed. Damon Knight, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Gene Wolfe's Book of Days (1981), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (1992), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction

“We don't harm the gods when we mingle their names with our curses and obscenities. We harm ourselves. I said that I didn't regard most gods as holy, but they don't have to be for our malice and mockery to recoil upon ourselves.”

Volume 3, Ch. 10
Fiction, The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001)

“One of the questions whose answers we seek is why we seek.”

Fiction, "The Fifth Head of Cerberus", Orbit 10 (1972)

““You’re a poet too, aren’t you? And a good liar, I bet.”
“I was the Autarch of Urth; that required a little lying, if you like. We called it diplomacy.””

Source: Fiction, The Book of the New Sun (1980–1983), The Urth of the New Sun (1987), Chapter 3, "The Cabin" (p. 20)

“The best way to be thought honest is to be honest.”

Volume 1, Ch. 12
Fiction, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996)

“The same critics who spend hundreds of pages discussing various peculiarities of the author's supposed nature often devote none to that much more significant person, the reader for whom he wrote. […] It is a failure that disqualifies a great deal of head-scratching and hypothesizing. It amounts to saying that the letter is more important than its recipient, the signal more important than the changing image created from it, the bait more important than the fish.”

Endangered Species (1989), Introduction
Nonfiction

“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.”

Fiction, "The Fifth Head of Cerberus", Orbit 10 (1972)

“I have called these animals destriers, borrowing an old word for war-horses. I've given them clawed feet instead of hoofs because I think the genetic engineers will give them claws too. The horse's hoofs seem to be an evolutionary mistake. To speak in Lamarckian terms, the horse has lengthened its legs by standing on its toes until it has ended up standing on one toenail. […] Cheetahs, wolves, and greyhounds all have nonretractile claws that serve them as their spikes serve runners and baseball players. Racehorses could not run as fast as they do if they did not wear aluminum or magnesium shoes.”

"Cavalry in the Age of the Autarch", in Castle of the Otter (1982), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

“There is more to be learned from any good teacher than the subject taught.”

Volume 2, Ch. 1
Fiction, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996)

“We may be damned at last, by God or our consciences; and though I've met a good many people who profess to credit no God, I've never met one who believed he had no conscience—this though he could no more produce it for my inspection than I could point out the God he demanded to see.”

Introduction for R. A. Lafferty, Episodes of the Argo (1990), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

“Those who have never fought suppose that the deserter who flies the field is consumed by shame. He is not, or he would not desert; with only trifling exceptions, battles are fought by cowards afraid to run.”

Source: Fiction, The Book of the New Sun (1980–1983), The Urth of the New Sun (1987), Chapter 16, "The Epitome" (p. 114)

“This, then, is the new illiteracy, the illiteracy of those who can read but don't. […] This new illiteracy is more pernicious than the old, because unlike the old illiteracy it does not debar its victims from power and influence, although like the old illiteracy it disqualifies them for it. Those long-dead men and women who learned to read so that they might read the Bible and John Bunyan would tell us that pride is the greatest of all sins, the father of sin. And the victims of the new illiteracy are proud of it. If you don't believe me, talk to them and see with what pride they trumpet their utter ignorance of any book you care to name.”

"From a house on the Borderland", Horrorstruck (1987), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

“When a tree is very old, yet still lives, sometimes the limbs are strangely twisted.”

Gene Wolfe book The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

"The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" (1970), Orbit 7, ed. Damon Knight, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Wolfe Archipelago (1983), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction

“If those who despise us stone us as prophets, they must listen to us as prophets. If they curse us as sorcerers, they must learn to curse from us, as sorcerers.
Let us enlighten the young, and let us be condemned for corrupting the young, like Socrates. Let us awaken the old before they sleep forever, though they must read us in secret like the Kabbalah. […] The difficulties and successes of our books and magazines, and the rejection and misinterpretation of the films made from our ideas—are the flounderings of the human mind upon the Paleozoic shore. We are the sand in its gills; let's not lose our grit.”

Guest of Honor speech at Aussiecon Two (August 1985), as published in Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

“She often spoke of marryin' a butcher or a sausage maker, having a liking for those trades, as she said, for they knew you couldn't never get all the stains from their aprons, and didn't demand it.”

"Our Neighbor by David Copperfield", Future Tense (1978), ed. Lee Harding, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Endangered Species (1989)
Fiction

“PARADOX: A statement that reduces the matter at hand to complete obscurity while clarifying it. […] Paradoxes are sensitive and can be routed by sneering.”

"Words Weird and Wonderful", in Castle of the Otter (1982), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

“We can dive to the bottom of the sea and some say NASA will fly us to the stars, and I have known men to plunge into the past—or the future—and drown. But there's one place where we can't go. We can't go where we are already. We can't go home, because our minds, and our hearts, and our immortal souls are already there there.”

"Kevin Malone", New Terrors (1980), ed. Ramsey Campbell, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Endangered Species (1989), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction

“There are people who love birds so much they free them. There are others who love them so much they cage them.”

Volume 3, Ch. 4
Fiction, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996)