Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist can’t hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.
People need God the way a three-year-old needs a chainsaw.
What good is power when you’re too wise to use it?
Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive
She’ll die.’ ‘Aye. That’s a consequence of being alive.
For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.
Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same…They can be neither separated, nor mixed.
There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,’ the mage said…’And life is also a terrible thing,’ Ged said, ‘and must be feared and praised.
To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.
Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.
I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after ‘semicolons,’ and another one after ‘now.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
Sure, it’s simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.
In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.
But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned.
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
Why is it that if you say you don’t enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren’t going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as “loathing�
But it doesn’t take a thousand men to open a door, my lord.””It might to keep it open.
I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps.
I was with you at the beginning of your journey. It is right that I should follow you to its end.
Without war there are no heroes.””What harm would that be?””Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is.
Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.
Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known.
Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that recognition of each person’s solitude which alone transcends it.
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
To say that an Orgota government fell means, of course, only that one group of Commensals replaced another group of Commensals in the controlling offices of the Thirty-Three. Some shadows got shorter and some longer, as they say in Karhide.
The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.
If women had power what would men be but women who can’t bear children? And what would women be but men who can?
Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men.
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
Stealthily the stars slid forward into nothingness.
It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.
Odo said it all her life. ‘Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice!
It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
So rest a while, we can talk in the cool of the evening. Or the cool of the morning. There ‘s seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.” -HawkWho had been ArchmageThe Other Wind
For discipline is the channel in which our acts run strong and deep; where there is no direction, the deeds of men run shallow and wander and are wasted.
In this he saw that Ogion had been right: the shadow could not draw on his power, so long as he was turned against it.
A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.
I know perfectly well he’s a god, too. But what I think is he’ll be much godlier after he’s dead.
Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?
If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
Power inheres in a center. You’re going to the center.
Under his feet he felt the hillroots going down and down into the dark, and over his head he saw the dry, far fires of the stars. Between, all things were his to order, to command. He stood at the center of the world.
I fear liars, and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country well. Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts long enough.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.
We’re not outside the world… We are the world. We’re its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don’t say the words, what is their in our world?
George, it’s impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
You don’t speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.
He copulated with a number of girls, but copulation was not the joy it ought to be. It was a mere relief of need, like evacuating, and he felt ashamed of it afterward because it involved another person as object.
While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
I suspect that the distinction between a maternal and a paternal instinct is scarcely worth making; the parental instinct, the wish to protect, to further, is not a sex-linked characteristic…
To see a candle’s light one must take it into a dark place.
But you’re so strong. I wish I were strong. I just like eating.
To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?’…’Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels.
A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
If the rowan’s roots are shallow, it bears no crown.
What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we have is here, now.
Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.
There’s a saying,” Aeneas said: “Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts.” He spoke wryly. “Horses, particularly.
Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it
Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.
As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage.
You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light. They could not hide you.
It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness… how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.
All that grieved me – that I was half one thing and half another and nothing wholly – was the sorrow of my childhood, but the strength and use of my life after I grew up.
It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma.
You always have to defend the imagination against idiots.
Can you walk the road your dream goes?Sometimes. Sometimes I am afraid to.Who is not….
No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.
Oh, Hank,” Susan whispered, “their wings are furry.””Oh, James,” Harriet whispered, “their hands are kind.
For the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest.
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.
An Odonian’s goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.
In the latter months of his own long sickness the Master Herbal had taught him much of the healer’s lore, and the first lesson and the last of all that lore was this: Heal the wound and cure the illness, but let the dying spirit go.
All her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars.
I am tired of safe places, and roofs, and walls around me.
What is evil?” asked the younger man. The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them both. “A web we men weave.” Ged answered.
In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.
I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.
To use the enemy’s weapon is to play the enemy’s game…speak the truth and hear the truth.
He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.
If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even.
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate.
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.
Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name’s the motherof the ten thousand things.
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras.
Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
They let us be, here, in the cage of our ignorance.
Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd.
The unknown…the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought…The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
[T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
I think we shall have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round and round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either.
A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government in earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
But the human being likes to be challenged, seeks freedom in adversity.
The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn’t it what all the great wars and battles are fought for — so that at day’s end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?
Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can’t understand that they end in him, but they don’t end with him.
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.
Other people’s stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
Pride kept her from confiding in the other girls, and caution kept her from confessing to the older women.
He, after all, had no standards of manliness, of virility, to complicate his pride.
The nod of a head is such a small thing, it can mean so little, yet it is the gesture of assent that allows, that makes to be. The nod is the gesture of power, the yes. The numen. the presence of the sacred, is called by its name.
Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it.
I have this, this gift, I know that; and I know my obligation to it.
The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
It takes a while to spoil a world, but it can be done.
Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience
To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.
There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just don’t understand. And incomprehension is boredom.
We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report.
His eyes saved him. What they insisted on seeing and reporting to him took him out of the autism of terror.
Cinders patter, falling with the snow. We creep infinitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself. Praise then Creation unfinished!
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice
… privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom.
In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell.
The truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing but does only and wholly what he must do.
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
You know there’s always prejudice in a revolutionary movement.
The revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We can’t stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.
Up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society, and its rules, as he from his.
What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair…Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
But she knew, though very vaguely, that she was crying, because hope hurts terribly when it breaks through the resignation in which you have lived for days.
Her despair grew so great that it burst her breast open and like a bird of fire shattered the stone and broke out into the light of day–the light of day, faint in her windowless room.
The premise is: everybody’s like me and we all think alike.The corollary is: people who don’t think like me don’t matter.
For if it’s all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it’s himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.
They can send death at once, but life is slower…
I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write.
The strength of Shevek’s personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable.
… there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing
There are talking dogs all over the place, unbelievably boring they are, on and on and on about sex and shit and smells, and smells and shit and sex, and do you love me, do you love me, do you love me.
But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet I would remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.
We men dream dreams, we work magic, we do good, we do evil. The dragons do not dream. They are dreams. They do not work magic: it is their substance, their being. They do not do; they are.
Dragons think we are amusing. But they remember Erreth-Akbe. They speak of him as if he were a dragon, not a man.
I never knew anybody, anywhere I have been, who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth, from orbit.
Independence was as far as his mind could reach. Yet I think his mind groped further, towards what he could not see, the body’s obscure, inalterable dream of mutuality.
You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth?
What is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry?
Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I supposed?
I was alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark palace, in a strange snow-changed city, in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world.
Oh, never and forever aren’t for mortals, love. But we won’t be parted till I know it’s right that we part.
They praised his modesty and did not listen to him, for listening is a rare gift, and men will have their heroes.
We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.
I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.
Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
Life rises out of death, death rises out of life, in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars.
Hideo,” said my mother, in the terrifying way women have of passing without interval from one subject to another because they have them all present in their mind at once, “you haven’t found any kind of relationship?
In this effort to attain security, independence and privacy of course were suspect….
He laid his hands on her head, pushing back the hood. He began to speak. His voice was soft, and the words were in no tongue she had ever heard. The sound of them came into her heart like rain falling. She grew still to listen.
I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
In diversity is life and where there’s life there’s hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.
Love doesn’t just sit there like a stone it has to be made like bread remade all the time made new.
It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.