Top 180 Gene Wolfe Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “It had become the face of a scholar of the worst kind, of the sort of man who has studied many things hidden from common men and grown wise and corrupt. He.”

— Gene Wolfe

152. “There are men – I have known a good many – who work all their lives for the same Fortune 500 company. They have families to support, and no skills that will permit them to leave and support their families by other means in another place. Their work is of little value, because few, if any, assignments of value come to them. They spend an amazing amount of time trying to find something useful to do. And, failing that, just trying to look busy.”

— Gene Wolfe

153. “White sparks cascaded onto the trembling wick. It was as if there were shooting stars in his hands, like the stars at the bottom of the grave to which Silk and Hyacinth had driven Orpine’s body in a dream he recalled with uncanny clarity. Here we dig holes in the ground for our dead, he thought, to bring them nearer the Outsider; and on Blue we do the same because we did it here, though it takes them away from him. The.”

— Gene Wolfe

154. “The pool and the miniature vale that contained it, always dark, grew darker still. Looking up after countless kisses, he saw idling fish of mottled gold and silver, black, white, and red, hanging in air above the goddess’s upraised hand, and for the first time noticed light streaming from a lamp of silver filigree in the branches of a stunted tree. “Where did they go?” he asked.”

— Gene Wolfe

155. “I have seldom found a lot to love about my fellow human beings, even when I liked them;.”

— Gene Wolfe

156. “We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams.”

— Gene Wolfe

157. “I said he had called them because it was from his mind that we drew them, seeking those who hated him, or at least had reason to. The giant you saw might have mastered the Commonwealth, had Severian not defeated him. The blond woman could not forgive him for bringing her back from death.”

— Gene Wolfe

158. “Life, after all, is not a high thing, and in many ways is the reverse of purity. I am wise now, if not much older, and I know it is better to have all things, high and low, than to have the high only.”

— Gene Wolfe

159. “There comes a time when a sorcerer must triumph on his own or die.”

— Gene Wolfe

160. “I would take an oath that I smelled Agilus’s blood on the rain-washed air before his head banged into the basket.”

— Gene Wolfe

161. “Year followed struggling year for me, and all that time I read – I suppose few have ever read so. I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure...”

— Gene Wolfe

162. “She was staring at the low ceiling, and I had the feeling that there was another Severian there, the kind and even noble Severian who existed only in Dorcas’s mind. All of us, I suppose, 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.”

— Gene Wolfe

163. “If you don’t know I can’t tell you. Yes, I can; because I want to turn things around. Like, everybody all the time only does it for himself or something he sees being part of him only bigger, an empire or a church, like that. I’m doing it for ants, to set us loose.” The bearded man said, “You stoned?” “Sure I’m stoned. Ken, I’m stoned blind.” “You don’t look stoned, man.” “Trust me.”

— Gene Wolfe

164. “You’re old when your dreams become regrets.”

— Gene Wolfe

165. “What went wrong? That is the question, and not “To be or not to be,” for all of Shakespeare.”

— Gene Wolfe

166. “It is not well to spend one’s symbols improvidently.”

— Gene Wolfe

167. “Strength and a stout heart are hazardous qualities where they cannot prevail.”

— Gene Wolfe

168. “If they are too quarrelsome to unite against him, and so violent that they’ll willingly pay his taxes to be protected from one another, they have no reason to complain.”

— Gene Wolfe

169. “That was a fine story,” I told her, “one of the best that I’ve ever heard.” “I had to live it,” she replied, “and it is far better to hear such stories than to live them, I promise you, though it ended so happily.”

— Gene Wolfe

170. “Magic,” Martha whispered breathlessly, “is diplomacy. It isn’t just saying the words. It’s who says them, how he says them, and when he says them.”

— Gene Wolfe

171. “In childhood, one imagines that any door unopened may open upon a wonder, a place different from all the places one knows. That is because in childhood it has so often proved to be so; the child, knowing nothing of any place except his own, is astonished and delighted by novel sights that an adult would readily have anticipated.”

— Gene Wolfe

172. “The instruments you have are the right instruments for you, because you’ve been shaped by them. That’s another law.”

— Gene Wolfe

173. “It is evil,” the Old Wise One said. “For very long we have walked carefree in the only paradise. It would be better if all here were to die.” The last Shadow child said firmly, “Nothing is worse than that I should die,” and something that had wrapped the world was gone.”

— Gene Wolfe

174. “By slow degrees, a feeling of disquiet seized me. I was miserable before I knew I was no longer happy, and bowed with responsibility when I did not yet fully understand I held it.”

— Gene Wolfe

175. “He was a rich man – richer, I think, than Mr. Macafee – and like most rich men he had nothing distinctive about him, the money having assumed for him the task of self-expression that, in poorer men, is assumed by the personality;.”

— Gene Wolfe

176. “What’s the difference between a human being and an animal?” “Intelligence, I suppose.” Audrey looked at me for guidance. “We’re smarter. Wouldn’t you agree?” I nodded. “As long as we’re writing the tests.”

— Gene Wolfe

177. “There are encounters that change nothing. Urth turns her aged face to the sun and he beams upon her snows; they scintillate and coruscate until each little point of ice hanging from the swelling sides of the towers seems the Claw of the Conciliator, the most precious of gems. Then everyone except the wisest believes that the snow must melt and give way to a protracted summer beyond summer.”

— Gene Wolfe

178. “She smiled the infinitely kind smile of a woman who will not do what you ask.”

— Gene Wolfe

179. “It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future.”

— Gene Wolfe

180. “Gurloes was one of the most complex men I have known, because he was a complex man trying to be simple. Not a simple, but a complex man’s idea of simplicity.”

— Gene Wolfe

181. “By the use of the language of sorrow I had for the time being obliterated my sorrow – 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

182. “For after all, if the lives of most men are examined in detail, it will be found that they have been experts of immense stature in some unremunerated field, the strategy and theory of some sport or the practice of some craft, have had an exhaustive knowledge of old circus posters or eighteenth-century inn signs or the mathematics of comets; and nothing so distinguished Professor Peacock from the ruck of men as his air of amateurishness.”

— Gene Wolfe

183. “In our commercial society, one may set one’s price as high as one wishes, but to refuse to sell at any price is treason.”

— Gene Wolfe

184. “One ought to drink, I think, when one is cheerful already. Otherwise nothing but more sorrow is poured into the cup.”

— Gene Wolfe

185. “Only the solitary may see the gods,” the giant told me. “For the rest, every god is the Unknown God.”

— Gene Wolfe

186. “It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile. That is why I have begun this account of it with the aftermath of our swim, in which I, the torturer’s apprentice Severian, had so nearly drowned.”

— Gene Wolfe