"An Interview with World Fantasy Award Finalist Brian Mcnaughton" by Jeff VanderMeer, in The Ministry of Whimsy (1998) http://www.epberglund.com/RGttCM/nightscapes/NS11/ns11nf1.htm
Context: I believe that we are soft creatures in a world with some very hard edges. It's remarkable that we survive at all, much less do high deeds or write great music. I think … tension … is a condition of our existence, and I do my best to depict it.
“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.”
Source: Shadow & Claw
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Gene Wolfe 102
American science fiction and fantasy writer 1931–2019Related quotes

“We hadn't invented 'Not Invented Here', yet.”
quoted in [Peter Hurley or Jack H. Stevens, A History of TOPS in alt.sys.pdp10 <1995Jan13.151041.8661@eisner>, 13 January, 1995, http://groups.google.com/group/alt.sys.pdp10/msg/17a1d08377234f79, 2006-12-26]
“In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.”
Source: The Library at Night

Attributed to Tomas Bata at tomasbata.com, 2015
Attributed to Tomas Bata

"The Calendar's New Clothes," New York Times (30 December 1999)

“Not far from the invention of fire… we must rank the invention of doubt.”
Collected Essays vol 6, viii; quoted in T. H. Huxley: Scientist, Humanist, and Educator (1950) by Cyril Bibby, p. 257
1890s

“We invent by intuition, though we prove by logic.”
Eminent Indians (1947)

Appendix VI : A few principal rituals – Liber Reguli.
Magick Book IV : Liber ABA, Part III : Magick in Theory and Practice (1929)
Context: We know one thing only. Absolute existence, absolute motion, absolute direction, absolute simultaneity, absolute truth, all such ideas: they have not, and never can have, any real meaning. If a man in delirium tremens fell into the Hudson River, he might remember the proverb and clutch at an imaginary straw. Words such as "truth" are like that straw. Confusion of thought is concealed, and its impotence denied, by the invention. This paragraph opened with "We know": yet, questioned, "we" make haste to deny the possibility of possessing, or even of defining, knowledge. What could be more certain to a parabola-philosopher that he could be approached in two ways, and two only? It would be indeed little less that the whole body of his knowledge, implied in the theory of his definition of himself, and confirmed by every single experience. He could receive impressions only be meeting A, or being caught up by B. Yet he would be wrong in an infinite number of ways. There are therefore Aleph-Zero possibilities that at any moment a man may find himself totally transformed. And it may be that our present dazzled bewilderment is due to our recognition of the existence of a new dimension of thought, which seems so "inscrutably infinite" and "absurd" and "immoral," etc. — because we have not studied it long enough to appreciate that its laws are identical with our own, though extended to new conceptions.

[NewsBank, 35, Associated Press, TV host decries U.S. failure to value science, math education, The Star-Ledger, Newark, New Jersey, December 10, 2000]