To use the enemy’s weapon is to play the enemy’s game…speak the truth and hear the truth.

Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. {…} But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet...

Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain’t no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction —...

A Woman is home caring for her children! even if she can’t. Trapped in this well-built trap, A Woman blames her mother for luring her into it, while ensuring that her own daughter never gets...

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets,...

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature...

I went to the springs while the sun was still up, and sitting on a rocky outcrop above the cave mouth I watched the light grow reddish across the misty pools, and listened to the...

Famous Writers Who Loathe E-Books,” reflects or caters to a silly idea: that not being interested in using a particular technology is the same as hating and despising it.

The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a...

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.

A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.

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.

Oh, never and forever aren’t for mortals, love. But we won’t be parted till I know it’s right that we part.

Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, “the love of nature” seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has...

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.

… privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom.

The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in...

Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name’s the motherof the ten thousand things.

right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might.

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...

Where does your soul go when you die in Hell?

o. It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren’t beautiful. They have big hands and...

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.

You don’t speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things....

Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I...

Was he leaving home, or going home?

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.

They can send death at once, but life is slower…

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life’s over...

To oppose something is to maintain it… You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

What good is power when you’re too wise to use it?

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.

A book won’t move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. A book won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in...

Eleştirmenler Tolkien’ı ‘basitleştirmeciliğinden’, Orta Dünya’nın sakinlerini iyiler ve kötüler diye ikiye ayırmasından ötürü çok suçladılar. Tolkien gerçekten de bunu yapıyor. […] öyküye ruhsal bir yolculuk olarak baktığınızda ise çok farklı ve tuhaf bir şeyle karşılaşıyorsunuz....

The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma.

He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who...

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.

They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got...

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...

Kafamda bu dusunceler gecip duruyordur, kalbim parcalanmisti, perisandi, cevremdeki insanlarla sevinmek istiyor, ama bunu yapamiyordum. Kendimi bir hain gibi hissediyordum, o buyuk hatayi ben yapmisim gibi, buna bizzat kendi, varligim ve kisiligimle ben neden olmusum...

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.