235 Quotes by Gene Wolfe

That was the way life was, the way death was. A man lived as long as you hated him and died on you as soon as you began to like him.

I have seldom found a lot to love about my fellow human beings, even when I liked them;.

He paused, and I knew he was delving again in a mind larger and darker than even his great library.

True courtesy,” he continued, “earns the name. It is courtesy that is truthful. When the plebeian kneels to the monarch, he is offering his neck. He offers it because he knows his ruler can take it if he wishes. Common people like that say-or rather, they used to say, in older and better times – that I have no love of truth. But the truth is that it is precisely truth that I love, an open acknowledgment of fact.

It is far easier to get all the good things that our lives have to offer than it is to deserve them. We seldom have much joy of them, however, unless we deserve them.

In childhood, one imagines that any door unopened may open upon a wonder, a place different from all the places one knows. That is because in childhood it has so often proved to be so; the child, knowing nothing of any place except his own, is astonished and delighted by novel sights that an adult would readily have anticipated.

It was a cruel and lawless place without him, and it seems to me that it’s better with him, if anything. A bad horse needs a big whip, as the saying goes.

The past stood at my shoulder, naked and defenseless as all dead things, as though it were time itself that had been laid open by the fall of the mountain.

Strength and a stout heart are hazardous qualities where they cannot prevail.