235 Quotes by Gene Wolfe

I had survived, and I should be dead. I was haunted by my own life.

I waded out of the sea while loving it still, even as I had earlier dropped from the stars while loving them; and in truth there is no place in Briah that is not lovely when it no longer holds the threat of death, save for the places men have made so.

For years I had known joy in nothing but victories, and now I felt myself a boy again. When I had wished to climb the Great Keep, it had never occurred to me that the Great Keep itself might wish to climb the sky; I knew better now. But this ship at least was climbing beyond the sky, and I wanted to climb with her.

We leave them to others. The day came when they stood at the right hand of the dwarf, with their feet upon sand and millet at their backs, and all three stood much taller than he. And upon that day he called across the desert to their mother. Small though he was, his voice was large, and held the pain of a thousand beatings and the pain of a lover who knows that love is past.

It had become the face of a scholar of the worst kind, of the sort of man who has studied many things hidden from common men and grown wise and corrupt. He.

No quarter will be given,” he told me. “Do you understand?” I said that I did not think I could kill a man who begged me for his life, but I would try.

I would take an oath that I smelled Agilus’s blood on the rain-washed air before his head banged into the basket.

As I stared into the fire, it seemed more possible than I would have liked to believe that someday, perhaps after a blow on the head, perhaps for no discernable cause, my imagination and my reason might reverse their places – just as two friends who come every day to the same seats in some public garden might at last decide for novelty’s sake to exchange them.

I love you, but you are another death, a death that has stayed with me and befriended me as the old death in the lake did, but death all the same.