Top 180 Gene Wolfe Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Do you think there are answers to everything here? Is that true in the place you come from?”

— Gene Wolfe

102. “My rule is never save bits. They get the way, and you don’t think of anything new. Put ’em in. Make a big mess.”

— Gene Wolfe

103. “I take his gold. I’m hated for that by men who would grovel for it, were it offered to them.” Myt-ser.”

— Gene Wolfe

104. “The chief thing is to begin, after all – after which the chief thing is to finish.”

— Gene Wolfe

105. “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 universes, and yet 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 better for it.”

— Gene Wolfe

106. “We can think only of creatures, of things He’s made. Creatures are all we know, and can be all we know until we know Him. When we think of Him like that, we find we can’t believe. He can’t be like a creature any more than a carpenter is like a table.”

— Gene Wolfe

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

— Gene Wolfe

108. “He said I had been touched by a god, and that I am a holy man. I said, “If I have been touched by a god, it was only to curse me.” He nodded. “All who are touched by gods are holy.”

— Gene Wolfe

109. “And when he beheld their dark sails, smutted by the burning tar that had blinded their enemy, he believed them blackened in mourning for the young man, and he threw himself down, and so perished. For no man lives long when his dreams are dead.”

— Gene Wolfe

110. “You have understood me better than I wanted, as the man said when he looked in the mirror.”

— Gene Wolfe

111. “I don’t think he hates in the way we understand it,” Dorcas replied softly. “Or for that matter, that he loves. He wants to manipulate everything he comes upon, to change it with his will. And since tearing down is easier than building, that’s what he does most often.”

— Gene Wolfe

112. “He was a bad man, a bully and a thug, yet he was deeply religious in his way – I very much doubt that he would have made such a thing up. It was not his sort of lie, if you know what I mean.”

— Gene Wolfe

113. “It was a cruel and lawless place without him, and it seems to me that it’s better with him, if anything. A bad horse needs a big whip, as the saying goes.”

— Gene Wolfe

114. “The past stood at my shoulder, naked and defenseless as all dead things, as though it were time itself that had been laid open by the fall of the mountain.”

— Gene Wolfe

115. “Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men’s threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.”

— Gene Wolfe

116. “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.”

— Gene Wolfe

117. “To be cursed by a god is to be touched by a god. To be touched by any god is to share divinity in some small measure. When the high priest leaves the sanctuary he strips off his clothing and bathes. Did you know that? His clothing is burned.” I.”

— Gene Wolfe

118. “If you know anything of science, madame, you must know that water is but ice given energy.”

— Gene Wolfe

119. “They were all thoroughly bad people of the type to which I myself belong – that is to say, bad people who are pleased to think themselves good.”

— Gene Wolfe

120. “There have been many times when I have felt I have gone mad, for I have had many great adventures, and the greatest adventures are those that act most strongly upon our minds.”

— Gene Wolfe

121. “As children we have no appreciation of scenery because, having not yet stored similar scenes in our imagination, with their attendant emotions and circumstances, we perceive it without psychic depth. I now looked at the cloudcrowned summits with my.”

— Gene Wolfe

122. “Why should the Increate protect us from ourselves? We might protect ourselves from ourselves. It may be that he will help us only when we come to regret what we have done.”

— Gene Wolfe

123. “From the top of the ramp he looked back and saw them go, their glasses crashing to the flagstoned paths and brick paved patios, their cigarettes dropping like poisoned fireflies. “I loved you,” the girl said. “Or at least I liked you. You’ll be gone in a moment and I can’t even ask you to kiss me, because I’m going to be sick.” “We’re still here,” John Edward told her, “both of us.” And she was gone.”

— Gene Wolfe

124. “Better to be good without reason than to be evil for a hundred good reasons.”

— Gene Wolfe

125. “One can’t found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction.”

— Gene Wolfe

126. “Among you Medes, I’m told, there are many men so honorable that everyone trusts them. We’re not like that at all – we never trust one another. So what we do instead is make sure that each side’s represented, so that every rascal’s got two worse looking over his shoulder.”

— Gene Wolfe

127. “He is the oldest of our sons, and although I loved him, I did not like him.”

— Gene Wolfe

128. “It has been my good fortune–or evil fortune, as it may be–that the places with which my life has been largely associated have been, with very few exceptions, of the most permanent character.”

— Gene Wolfe

129. “Here is light. You will say that it is not a living entity, but you miss the point that it is more, not less. Without occupying space, it fills the universe. It nourishes everything, yet itself feeds upon destruction. We claim to control it, but does it not perhaps cultivate us as a source of food? May it not be that all wood grows so that it can be set ablaze, and that men and women are born to kindle fires?”

— Gene Wolfe

130. “And then I saw it – not below, where I had looked, but over my head, a vast and noble curve stretching away to either side, with white cloud flying between ourselves and it, a world all speckled over with blue and green like the egg of a wild bird.”

— Gene Wolfe

131. “She sighed, and all the gladness went out of her face, as the sunlight leaves the stone where a beggar seeks to warm himself.”

— Gene Wolfe

132. “My teeth warred in my mouth, the teeth above against the teeth below.”

— Gene Wolfe

133. “That was the way life was, the way death was. A man lived as long as you hated him and died on you as soon as you began to like him.”

— Gene Wolfe

134. “He paused, and I knew he was delving again in a mind larger and darker than even his great library.”

— Gene Wolfe

135. “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.”

— Gene Wolfe

136. “All those who teach are hated.”

— Gene Wolfe

137. “We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized.”

— Gene Wolfe

138. “His eyes say quite plainly that he once trusted someone, that he has been repenting it for longer than you or I have been alive, and that he will never take the chance again.”

— Gene Wolfe

139. “All this and much else besides, lovely and appalling, blood red and living green, yellow, blue, white, and velvet black, with minglings of other colors and of colors he had never known.”

— Gene Wolfe

140. “You claim the right to prosecute me in accordance with your laws, the laws of Dorp, about which I know nothing. I claim the right to defend myself by the only law I know, the law of reason. Reason demands an impartial judge, and that I be given the advice of someone who knows your law.”

— Gene Wolfe

141. “We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.”

— Gene Wolfe

142. “I don’t think anyone is more intrinsically holy. People experience God in many ways; and it seems to me that God does what the rest of us do: He chooses the means that best gets His message across.”

— Gene Wolfe

143. “Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it.”

— Gene Wolfe

144. “I had a professor in medical school who used to say, ‘Happy is the man who has found his work – but of course the addict who has found a quart jar of heroin is happy, too.’ One kind of addiction is approved by society, Mr. Weer, and the other is not, but both destroy their victims.”

— Gene Wolfe

145. “The gem, which he had supposed colorless, caught a ray of sunlight from the god-gate in the roof and flashed a watery green. For some reason, it reminded him of her eyes. He put it to his lips, his thoughts full of things that could never be.”

— Gene Wolfe

146. “But love is the last need a group has, not the first. If it were the first, there could be no such groups. Justice is the first need, the mortar that binds together a village or a town, or even a city. Or the crew of a boat. No one would take part in any such thing if he did not believe that he would be treated fairly.”

— Gene Wolfe

147. “All beds became deathbeds at last.”

— Gene Wolfe

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

— Gene Wolfe

149. “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.”

— Gene Wolfe

150. “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.”

— Gene Wolfe