Gene Wolfe Quotes
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What is perceived is dictated by the instrument. If you had other eyes, or another mind, you would see all things otherwise.
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Everyone who is grieved at anything, or discontented, is like a pig for sacrifice, kicking and squealing. Like a dove for sacrifice is he who laments in silence. Our one distinction is that it is given to us to consent, if we will, to the necessity imposed upon us.
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Now I must, I suppose, explain why I have been writing this account. ... I have written to disclose myself to myself, and I am writing now because I will, I know, sometime read what I am now writing and wonder. Perhaps by the time I do, I will have solved the mystery of myself, or perhaps I will no longer care to know the solution.
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Until we reach the end of time, we don’t know whether something’s been good or bad; we can only judge the intentions of those who acted.
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Whenever a man and a woman come to words or blows, fools are quick to attribute it to the differences between the sexes. The sexes differ much less than they wish to believe, and such differences as are real tend less to promote strife than to prevent it.
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The jokes of the gods are long in the telling.
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The only actors who can really do justice to their parts are the ones who don't know what they are.
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One of the questions whose answers we seek is why we seek.
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We're going to fight to the end. But it's better if you fight to somebody else's end.
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A hundred wise men have said in various ways that love transcends the power of death, and millions of fools have supposed that they meant nothing by it. At this late hour in my life I have learned what they meant. They meant that love transcends death. They are correct.
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The gods smile on us, my son, or so it is written. It's a wonder they don't laugh aloud.
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Experience is a wonderful teacher, but one whose lessons come too late.
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'Yours is a race of pawns,' Tzadkiel told me. 'You move forward only, unless we move you back to begin the game again. But not all the pieces on the board are pawns.'
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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.
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Every theory is true in some discipline. The beauty of this is that it carries its own confirmation.
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When a tree is very old, yet still lives, sometimes the limbs are strangely twisted.
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'I pledged myself to show you wonders.'I drew her farther from the building. 'I’m not ready to see wonders. Yours, or any other woman’s.'
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There is no human quality more attractive than the courage of the weak.
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We can dive to the bottom of the sea and some say NASA will fly us to the stars, and I have known men to plunge into the past-or the future-and drown. But there's one place where we can't go. We can't go where we are already. We can't go home, because our minds, and our hearts, and our immortal souls are already there there.
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'We can only hope.''That’s like the frog said when he seen the stork.'
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Time passed, slipping through the waist of the universe's great hourglass like the eroded soil of this continent slipping down her rivers to the seas.
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Very small, child, are the flying days of love, and men and women must catch them when they can, if they are to know love at all.
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They based their extrapolations on numbers. That worked as long as money, which is easily measured numerically, was the principle motivating force in human affairs. But as time progressed, human actions became responsive instead to a multitude of incommensurable vectors.
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It is well not to spend one's symbols improvidently.