I 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

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

It seems to me that you can almost define civilization by saying it's people who are not willing to hurt other people because the other people are different.

— Gene Wolfe

I was miserable before I knew I was no longer happy

— Gene Wolfe

Just as the room of the Inquisitor in Dr. Talks's play, with its high judicial bench, lurked somewhere at the lowest level of the House Absolute, so we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of our minds a counter at which we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present.

— Gene Wolfe

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

— Gene Wolfe

Master Plasmon's hand, dry and wrinkled as a mummy's, groped until it found mine. "Among the initiates of religion it is said, 'You are an post always.' The reference is not only to knowledge but to their chrism, whose mark, being invisible, is ineradicable. You know our chrism." I nodded again." Less even than theirs can it be washed away. Should you leave now, men will only say, 'He was nurtured by the torturers.' But when you have been anointed they will say, 'He is a torturer.' You may follow the plow or the drum, but still you will hear, 'He is a torturer.' Do you understand that?

— Gene Wolfe

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

— Gene Wolfe

My rule is never safe bits. They get the way, and you don't think of anything new. Put 'em in. Make a big mess.

— Gene Wolfe

Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude characters of their speech.

— Gene Wolfe