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54b8e92
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People don't want other people to be people.
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people
selfishness
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Gene Wolfe |
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6582182
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We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life--they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know t..
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Gene Wolfe |
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4ba4aaf
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Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.
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reality
strength
weakness
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Gene Wolfe |
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63a3c69
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What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
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Gene Wolfe |
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ccb8f63
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That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
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unforgivable
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Gene Wolfe |
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20aef93
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And what of the dead? I own that I thought of myself, at times, almost as dead. Are they not locked below ground in chambers smaller than mine was, in their millions of millions? 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. Their bodies repose in caskets, in sarcop..
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Gene Wolfe |
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d9c9c6f
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There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.
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magic
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Gene Wolfe |
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16dddf5
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What struck me on the beach-and it struck me indeed, so that I staggered as at a blow-was that if the Eternal Principle had rested in that curved thorn I had carried about my neck across so many leagues, and if it now rested in the new thorn (perhaps the same thorn) I had only now put there, then it might rest in everything, in every thorn in every bush, in every drop of water in the sea. The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were ..
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Gene Wolfe |
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8e94385
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I would like [my readers] to better understand human beings and human life as a result of having read [my] stories. I'd like them to feel that this was an experience that made things better for them and an experience that gave them hope. I think that the kind of things that we talk about at this conference -- fantasy very much so, science fiction, and even horror -- the message that we're sending is the reverse of the message sent by what i..
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fiction
fantasy
optimism
hope
science-fiction
horror
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Gene Wolfe |
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e44e17a
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When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
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payment
merit
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Gene Wolfe |
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b7a6d4b
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One of the easiest ways to dominate a man is to demand something he cannot supply.
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Gene Wolfe |
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e98bd59
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We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.
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symbols
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Gene Wolfe |
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b2b8741
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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.
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Gene Wolfe |
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6f90459
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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.
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Gene Wolfe |
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5fdafc6
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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.
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Gene Wolfe |
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5d308a7
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No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death - every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence..
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Gene Wolfe |
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b2f113d
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I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
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Gene Wolfe |
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cd4ac0a
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Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight.
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Gene Wolfe |
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63810b1
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I have never had much need for companionship, unless it was the companionship of someone I could call a friend. Certainly I have seldom wished the conversation of strangers or the sight of strange faces. I believe rather that when I was alone I felt I had in some fashion lost my individuality; to the thrush and the rabbit I had been not Severian, but Man. The many people who like to be utterly alone, and particularly to be utterly alone in ..
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Gene Wolfe |
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dbcacf3
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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
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reality
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Gene Wolfe |
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fbeaecb
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We choose--or choose not--to be alone when we decide whom we will accept as our fellows, and whom we will reject. Thus an eremite in a mountain is in company, because the birds and coneys, the initiates whose words live in his 'forest books,' and the winds--the messengers of the Increate--are his companions. Another man, living in the midst of millions, may be alone, because there are none but enemies and victims around him.
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Gene Wolfe |
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7aa0d03
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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.
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Gene Wolfe |
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876fbfc
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Sometimes driven aground by the photon storms, by the swirling of the galaxies, clockwise and counterclockwise, ticking with light down the dark sea-corridors lined with our silver sails, our demon-haunted sails, our hundred-league masts as fine as threads, as fine as silver needles sewing the threads of starlight, embroidering the stars on black velvet, wet with the winds of Time that go racing by. The bone in her teeth! The spume, the fly..
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hethor
photon-storms
star-sailing
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Gene Wolfe |
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ce8aa22
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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.
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Gene Wolfe |
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f616e52
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Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
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Gene Wolfe |
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666ca8c
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The necropolis has never seemed a city of death to me; I know its purple roses (which other people think so hideous) shelter hundreds of small animals and birds. The executions I have seen performed and have performed myself so often are no more than a trade, a butchery of human beings who are for the most part less innocent and less valuable than cattle. When I think of my own death, or the death of someone who has been kind to me, or even..
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Gene Wolfe |
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7887fa8
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I felt that pressure of time that is perhaps the surest indication we have left childhood behind.
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Gene Wolfe |
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c977a77
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We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.
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Gene Wolfe |
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feb3044
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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...
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Gene Wolfe |
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b7b198e
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I have said that I cannot explain my desire for her, and it is true. I loved her with a love thirsty and desperate. I felt that we two might commit some act so atrocious that the world, seeing us, would find it irresistible.
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Gene Wolfe |
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47ad36b
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Time turns our lies into truths.
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time
truth
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Gene Wolfe |
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73435de
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The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.
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Gene Wolfe |
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56d2231
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I have no way of knowing whether you, who eventually will read this record, like stories or not. If you do not, no doubt you have turned these pages without attention. I confess that I love them. Indeed, it often seems to me that of all the good things in the world, the only ones humanity can claim for itself are stories and music; the rest, mercy, beauty, sleep, clean water and hot food (as the Ascian would have said) are all the work of t..
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Gene Wolfe |
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0a583ee
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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 thi..
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Gene Wolfe |
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29bd30c
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Tous, nous aimons ce que nous detruisons.
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mort
destruction
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Gene Wolfe |
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3f42161
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I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when I came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came ..
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Gene Wolfe |
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8f704c0
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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?
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Gene Wolfe |
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e3cfe53
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It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual.
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Gene Wolfe |
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3c97254
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Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as rain.
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time
rain
river
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Gene Wolfe |
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87b6d4d
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Reason shows reason can only bring pain - how wise to forget and be happy again!
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Gene Wolfe |
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64221d8
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Time turns our lies into truth
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Gene Wolfe |
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3667e29
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You think whatever is wrong with you is contagious, then?' She laughed again. 'Yes, but you have it already. You caught it from your mother. Death.
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Gene Wolfe |
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5a04ea4
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We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard defining edges.
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symbol
|
Gene Wolfe |
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061cb60
|
Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. [...] We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.
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Gene Wolfe |