235 Quotes by Gene Wolfe

There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men – all are dead.

Do you think there are answers to everything here? Is that true in the place you come from?

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.

A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart.

He who had given all books into my keeping made me blind so that I should know in whose keeping the keepers stand.

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.

Don’t nobody ever want it to rain,” the nearest of the sellers of beasts remarked philosophically, “but everybody wants to go on eatin’.

Reality is a crutch for people who can’t handle science fiction.

Just as the room of the Inquisitor in Dr. Talos’s play, with its high judicial bench, lurked somewhere at the lowest level of the House Absolute, so we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of our minds a counter at which we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present.