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...

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.

The interplay of the aesthetic with the erotic is complex. The peacock’s tail is beautiful to us, sexy to the peahen. Beauty and sexual attractiveness overlap, coincide. They may be deeply related. I think they...

He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd.

Time is not duration but intensity; time is the beat and the interval […]

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks...

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.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with...

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

If women had power, what would men be but women who can’t bear children? And what would women be but men who can?…I mean, men give her [a queen] power. They let her use their...

When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do,...

At the pit’s bottom is no anger.

Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience

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

If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were...

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a...

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

Orr slept. He dreamed. There was no rub.

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.

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.

The king was pregnant.

It’s a queer business, making oneself blind.

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers....

To me the ”female principle” is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs...

I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises: and how so real a love...

I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do....

I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved...

The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I...

I want to say to the literature teacher who remains wilfully, even boastfully ignorant of a major element of contemporary fiction: you are incompetent to teach or judge your subject. Readers and students who do...

Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel...

I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.

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.

Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our...

Judgement is poverty.

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.