235 Quotes by Gene Wolfe

Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.

One can't found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction. Look at the great successes of the past--they say their deities are the masters of all the universes, and yet that they require grandmothers to defend them, as if they were children frightened by poultry. Or that the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become the better for it.

All the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive.

All of us... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

I was trapped in admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the captive of some long-vanished pine.

You're a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism doesn't make materialism true. Don't you know that? In the final summing up, it is spirit and dream, thought and love and act that matter.

A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what is commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice, and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.

So powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.

Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.