235 Quotes by Gene Wolfe

Life, after all, is not a high thing, and in many ways is the reverse of purity. I am wise now, if not much older, and I know it is better to have all things, high and low, than to have the high only.

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.

People don’t want other people to be people.

A young man seeks a woman and finds her and is great and dies to the world. Afterward he is never as great again, but the woman is a comfort to him, reminding him of the time that was, and he is a little again with her what once he was wholly.

He was a bad man, a bully and a thug, yet he was deeply religious in his way – I very much doubt that he would have made such a thing up. It was not his sort of lie, if you know what I mean.

She sighed, and all the gladness went out of her face, as the sunlight leaves the stone where a beggar seeks to warm himself.

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night, Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to. Flight.

Though trodden beneath the shepherd’s heel, the wild hyacinth blooms on the ground.

Things opposite unite and appear to disappear. The potential for both remains. That is one of the greatest principles of the causes of things.