Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.

— Gene Wolfe

We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last.

— Gene Wolfe

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard defining edges.

— Gene Wolfe

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.

— Gene Wolfe

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

What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.

— Gene Wolfe

Whatever 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

When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.

— Gene Wolfe

When 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

You believe me wise because I taught you once, but I have not been north, as you have. You have seen (what) I have never seen... You flatter me by asking my opinion.

— Gene Wolfe