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.

How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the...

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.

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

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.

Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it. When that...

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.

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the...

Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn’t taking place.

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

…you play the instrument you have.

I know perfectly well he’s a god, too. But what I think is he’ll be much godlier after he’s dead.

…You have knowledge, and I have skill, and between us we have…””We have the Ring of Erreth-Akbe.””Yes, that. But I thought also of another thing between us. Call it trust… That is one of its...