A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and...

This concern, feebly called ‘love of nature’, seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe....

In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.

The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That’s enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she...

If women had power what would men be but women who can’t bear children? And what would women be but men who can?

Can you walk the road your dream goes?Sometimes. Sometimes I am afraid to.Who is not….

So maybe the difference isn’t language. Maybe it’s this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong...

The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.

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…

Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing

As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples...

We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

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...

Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.

Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this...

What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.

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 pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography. For the ultimate selling job...

Page 15, paperback version by Virago Press 1997: … Let me ask you this, Mr Ai: do you know, by your own experience, what patriotism is?” ‘No’, I said, shaken by the force of the...

Everything is old, here. We are old – the Masters.””You’re not,” Irian said. She thought him between thirty and forty[…]”But I came far. Miles can be years.

We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don’t live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the...

A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can’t “get into” me,...

This was a great magic. Festin had no more performed it than has any man who in exile or danger longs for the earth and waters of his home, seeing and yearning over the doorsill...

You always have to defend the imagination against idiots.

Well,” he said slowly, “sometimes there’s a passion that comes in its springtime to ill fate or death. And because it ends in its beauty, it’s what the harpers sing of and the poets make...

As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at...

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

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...

He looked at me. His firm, broad face showed weight-loss in deep shadows under the cheekbones, his eyes were sunken and his mouth sorely chapped and cracked. God knows what I looked like, when he...

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.

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have...

And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of...

The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one....

A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.

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.

Other people’s stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.

The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want...

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not...

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

Aeneas’ mother is a star?””No; a goddess.”I said cautiously, “Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus.”He thought it over....

This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.

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.

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.

Sairin bana siirinde okudugu Troya’nin dususu hikayesinde kralin kizi Cassandra olacaklari onceden goruyor ve Troyalıların buyuk atı sehre sokmalarını onlemeye calisiyor, ama onu kimse dinlemiyordu: Uzerrindeki lanetti bu, hakikati gorecek, bunu soyleyecek, ama onu kimse...

We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can...

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!

Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full...

Do the people in this country approve of this war?” […].”Approve? You don’t think we’d lie down and let the damned Thuvians walk all over us? Our status as a world power is at stake!””But...

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist;...

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.