Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
She obeys me, but only because she wants to. It's the only justification for obedience, Ged observed.
The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.
There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.
When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.
Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.
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.
Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.
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.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.
When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.
I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.
That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.
Very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.
If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it's an easy name to call another man.
If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.
Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.
The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance.
The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else.
The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel.
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
In innocence there is no strength against evil, said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. But there is strength in it for good.
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.
Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.
Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.
Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.
I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.
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.
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.