01c. 1966 ADHow big is a man's life?" asked Ultan."I have no way of knowing, but isn't it larger than that?""You see it from the beginning, and anticipate much. I, recollecting it from its termination, know how little there has been. I suppose that is why the depraved creatures who devour the bodies of the dead seek more.Gene Wolfe / quote ↗
02c. 1966 ADBut I was awake, sitting by the window looking down at the trailer and Mr. Zoltan's truck. I could not sleep. That is how it is with folks my age. We take naps during the day, and then we cannot sleep at night. I think that it is because God is getting us ready for the grave. Is that right? Did He ever tell you? ("The Little Stranger")Gene Wolfe / quote ↗
03c. 1966 ADWhen we are asleep, so it seems to me, we sleep surrounded by all the years. I have imagined, sleeping, that I heard the footsteps of the long-dead; I have held conversations with them, and with the blank-faced people I was yet to meet, conversations that seemed of unbearable poignancy, though when I woke I could remember only a few words, and those not words that possessed, waking, any emotional significance to me. It is said that this is because content is divorced from emotion in sleep, as though the sleeping mind read two books at once, one of tears and lust and laughter, the other words and phrases picked up from old newspapers, from grimy handbills blowing along the street and conversations overheard in barbershops and bars, and the banalities of radio. I think rather that we have forgotten on waking what the words have meant to us, or have not learned as yet what they will mean. But the worst thing is to wake and remember that we have been talking to the dead, having never thought to hear that voice again, having never any expectation of hearing it again before we ourselves are gone.Gene Wolfe / quote ↗
04c. 1966 ADWhatever we may say, all of us suffer from disturbed sleep at times.Some in truth hardly sleep, though some who sleep copiously swear that they do not.Some are disquieted by incessant dreams, and a fortunate few are visited often by dreams of delightful character.Some will say that they were at one time troubled in sleeping but have 'recovered' from it, as though awareness were a disease, as perhaps it is.Gene Wolfe / quote ↗
05c. 1966 ADYou never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.Gene Wolfe / quote ↗
07c. 1966 ADIf you have a machine with three or four parts, you can shake them up in a box and it's still pretty clear what's there. If you have a machine with 10,000 parts and you shake them up in a box, what you have is a box of junk.Gene Wolfe / quote ↗
08c. 1966 ADTime 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.Gene Wolfe / quote ↗
09c. 1966 ADIt 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 / quote ↗
11c. 1966 ADThen 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.Gene Wolfe / quote ↗
12c. 1966 ADI 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 / quote ↗
13c. 1966 ADI have sometimes thought that the reason the trees are so quiet in the summer is that they are in a sort of ecstasy; it is in winter, when the biologists tell us they sleep, that they are most awake, because the sun is gone and they are addicts without their drug, sleeping restlessly and often waking, walking the dark corridors of forests searching for the sun.Gene Wolfe / quote ↗
14c. 1966 ADThe brown book I carry says there is nothing stranger than to explore a city wholly different from all those one knows, since to do so is to explore a second and unsuspected self. I have found a thing stranger: to explore such a city only after one has lived in it for some time without learning anything of it.Gene Wolfe / quote ↗
15c. 1966 ADMy 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 / quote ↗
16c. 1966 ADKnowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.Gene Wolfe / quote ↗
