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

No man lives long when his dreams are dead.

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

So powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.

All time exists. That is the truth.... If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind?

Women believe -- or at least often pretend to believe -- that all our tenderness for them springs from desire; that we love them when we have not for a time enjoyed them, and dismiss them when we are sated, or to express it more precisely, exhausted. There is no truth in this idea, though it may be made to appear true. When we are rigid with desire, we are apt to pretend a great tenderness in the hope of satisfying that desire; but at no other time are we in fact so liable to treat women brutally, and so unlikely to feel any deep emotion but one.

Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

Everyone knows ... that we have fallen far from the brave days of the past.

There are few advantages, I'll tell you, that profit a man more than humor. Humor will draw a crowd. Humor will calm a mob or reassure a nursery school.

I believe there is no other difference between those who are called courageous and those who are branded craven than that the second are fearful before the danger and the first after it. No one can be much frightened, certainly, during a period of great and immanent peril -- the mind is too much concentrated on the thing itself, and on the actions necessary to meet or avoid it. The coward is a coward, then, because he has brought his fear with him; persons we think cowardly will sometimes amaze us by their bravery, if they have had no forewarning of their danger.

Perhaps when night closes our eyes there is less order than we believe. Perhaps, indeed, it is this lack of order we perceive as darkness, a randomization of the waves of energy (like a sea), the fields of energy (like a farm) that appear to our deluded eyes -- set by light in an order of which they themselves are incapable -- to be the real world.

A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart.

You wouldn't believe how many I've seen coming up the road here. But precious few going back. Well, that's what war is, I believe. I always try to tell myself they're still there -- I mean, wherever it was they went -- but you know and I know there's a lot that have gone to stay.

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.

No man has a home unless he is master of a place where he must please no one — a place where he can go and lock the door behind him.

Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.

Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.

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

GENE WOLFE, Shadow & Claw

The best way to describe silence is to say nothing--but what grace!

GENE WOLFE, The Book of the New Sun

There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.