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