235 Quotes by Gene Wolfe

When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.

I am deserving of no gifts.""That is so. But you must recall, Severian, that when a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but payment.

How big is a man's life?" asked Ultan."I have no way of knowing, but isn't it larger than that?""You see it from the beginning, and anticipate much. I, recollecting it from its termination, know how little there has been. I suppose that is why the depraved creatures who devour the bodies of the dead seek more.

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.

Whatever we may say, all of us suffer from disturbed sleep at times.Some in truth hardly sleep, though some who sleep copiously swear that they do not.Some are disquieted by incessant dreams, and a fortunate few are visited often by dreams of delightful character.Some will say that they were at one time troubled in sleeping but have 'recovered' from it, as though awareness were a disease, as perhaps it is.

It is well, I think, for us to learn to tell evil from good; but it has its price, as everything does. We leave our evil friend behind.

One of the easiest ways to dominate a man is to demand something he cannot supply.

We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last.

Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight.