Top 180 Gene Wolfe Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.”

— Gene Wolfe

2. “There is no limit to stupidity. – Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.”

— Gene Wolfe

3. “We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.”

— Gene Wolfe

4. “Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers.”

— Gene Wolfe

5. “You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.”

— Gene Wolfe

6. “Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.”

— Gene Wolfe

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

— Gene Wolfe

8. “What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.”

— Gene Wolfe

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

— Gene Wolfe

10. “Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night, Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to. Flight.”

— Gene Wolfe

11. “That was when I found out that the best way in the world to make yourself feel better when you have hit bottom is to try to get somebody else to feel better. There are certain things in life that are truly worth knowing, and that is one of the big ones.”

— Gene Wolfe

12. “All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.”

— Gene Wolfe

13. “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.”

— Gene Wolfe

14. “If a man bullies a woman, all the women turn against him. Then the other men mock him because he sleeps alone.”

— Gene Wolfe

15. “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.”

— Gene Wolfe

16. “When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.”

— Gene Wolfe

17. “There’s a certain kind of lonely man who rejects love, because he believes that anyone who offers it wouldn’t be a lover worth having.”

— Gene Wolfe

18. “My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.”

— Gene Wolfe

19. “When a client is driven to the utmost extremity, it is warmth and food and ease from pain he wants. Peace and justice come afterward. Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize.”

— Gene Wolfe

20. “Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.”

— Gene Wolfe

21. “Do not start a story unless you have an ending in mind. You can change the story’s ending if you wish, but you should always have a destination.”

— Gene Wolfe

22. “You do not characterize by telling the reader about the character. You do it by showing the character thinking, speaking and acting in a characteristic way. You simply show it and shut up.”

— Gene Wolfe

23. “Some writers say they cannot write in front of a window; many say they cannot function without almost perfect quiet. A writer with only two hours a day can write in the back of an open truck on the Interstate.”

— Gene Wolfe

24. “You seem to think that the only genuine existence evil can have is conscious existence – that no one is evil unless he admits it to himself. I disagree.”

— Gene Wolfe

25. “We think that we know a man or a woman, when so much of what we know is actually that man’s or that woman’s situation, his or her place on the board of life. Move the pawn to the last row and see her rise in armor, sword in hand.”

— Gene Wolfe

26. “It’s a pity you are a torturer,” Ultan said. “You might have been a philosopher.”

— Gene Wolfe

27. “Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.”

— Gene Wolfe

28. “Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.”

— Gene Wolfe

29. “The young king, bright with such gold as is not found in any mine, strode across the waves; and the glory of him was such that he who looked on it should never look upon another.”

— Gene Wolfe

30. “Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?”

— Gene Wolfe

31. “Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.”

— Gene Wolfe

32. “Though trodden beneath the shepherd’s heel, the wild hyacinth blooms on the ground.”

— Gene Wolfe

33. “That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.”

— Gene Wolfe

34. “Here I pause. If you wish to walk no farther with me, reader, I do not blame you. It is no easy road.”

— Gene Wolfe

35. “Reality is a crutch for people who can’t handle science fiction.”

— Gene Wolfe

36. “It had been washed clean of beauty. In the final reckoning there is only love, only that divinity. That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.”

— Gene Wolfe

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

— Gene Wolfe

38. “The world is filled half with evil and half with good. We can tilt it forward so that more good runs into our minds, or back, so that more runs into this.” A movement of her eyes took in all the lake. “But the quantities are the same, we change only their proportion here or there.” “I would tilt it as far back as I can, until at last the evil runs out altogether,” I said. “It might be the good that would run out. But I am like you; I would bend time backward if I could.”

— Gene Wolfe

39. “There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men – all are dead.”

— Gene Wolfe

40. “Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real. What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it?”

— Gene Wolfe

41. “We only have one dog now. Calamity Jane had to be put down. She was very old, and her medicine no longer controlled her seizures. Dilly is five now, I think. He’s a neutered American Pit Bull Terrier, very gentle, about the color of buckskin.”

— Gene Wolfe

42. “The picture he was cleaning showed an armored figure standing in a desolate landscape. It had no weapon, but held a staff bearing a strange, stiff banner. The visor of this figure’s helmet was entirely of gold, without eye slits or ventilation; in its polished surface the deathly desert could be seen in reflection, and nothing more.”

— Gene Wolfe

43. “I have a bird. Inside.” She patted the flat stomach below her small breasts, and for a moment Nicholas thought she had really found food. “She sits in here. She has tangled a nest in my entrails, where she sits and tears at my breath with her beak. I look healthy to you, don’t I? But inside I’m hollow and rotten and turning brown, dirt and old feathers, oozing away. Her beak will break through soon.”

— Gene Wolfe

44. “You must know the story of how the race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away all the wild half of themselves to do so, so that they no longer cared for the taste of the pale wind, no for love or lust, nor to make new songs nor to sing old ones, nor for any of the other animal things they believed they had brought with them out of the rain forests al the bottom of time – though in fact, so my uncle told me, those things brought them.”

— Gene Wolfe

45. “People don’t want other people to be people.”

— Gene Wolfe

46. “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.”

— Gene Wolfe

47. “It was in this instant of confusion that I realized for the first time that I am in some degree insane.”

— Gene Wolfe

48. “I had turned my mind from my survival just as a man suffering from a deadly sickness manages by a thousand tricks never to look at death squarely; or rather, as a woman alone in a large house refrains from looking into mirrors, and instead busies herself with trivial errands, so that she may catch no glimpse of the thing whose feet she hears at times on the stairs.”

— Gene Wolfe

49. “If we could have our way, no man would have to go roving or draw blood. But women did not make the world. All of you are torturers, one way or another.”

— Gene Wolfe

50. “A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart.”

— Gene Wolfe