"In this he saw that Ogion had been right: the shadow could not draw on his power, so long as he was turned against it."

"Science fiction is not prescriptive, it is descriptive."

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

"Judgement is poverty."

"It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end."

"And I did nothing, nothing but try to hide from the horror of dying." He stopped, for saying the truth aloud was unendurable. It was not shame that stopped him, but fear, the same fear. He knew now why this tranquil life in sea and sunlight on the rafts seemed to him like an after-life or a dream, unreal. It was because he knew in his heart that reality was empty: without life or warmth or color or sound: without meaning. There were no heights or depths. All this lovely play of form and light and color on the sea and in the eyes of men, was no more than that, a playing of illusions on the shallow void."

"Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won't talk about anything except the injustice of the United States income tax structure toward people with fluctuating income, or how to breed Black Angus cows, or something."

"You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light. They could not hide you."

"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."

"There must be darkness to see the stars."

"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 white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren't about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men."

"Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?"

"The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller."

"George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight."

"It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope."

"No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world."

"If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do."

"He seemed not to know the uses of silence."

"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."

"I'm afraid of life! There are times I--I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn't all a misunderstanding-- this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain... If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could... get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way."

"Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex."

"People need God the way a three-year-old needs a chainsaw."

"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. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more."

"COME HOME, TENAR! COME HOME!In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face toward home. The mother waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind her, watched the tiny figure running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass beneath the trees."

"They had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies."

"The king was pregnant."

"As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage."

"Truth is a matter of the imagination."

"And not only narrativity but the quality of the writing is of the first importance to me. Rightly or not, I believe a dull, inept style signals poverty or incompleteness of thought. I see the accuracy, scope, and quality of Darwin's intellect directly expressed in the clarity, strength, and vitality of his writing - the beauty of it."

"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 can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?"

"But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord.""It might to keep it open."

"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 hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it."

"My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first."

"He, after all, had no standards of manliness, of virility, to complicate his pride."

"We're not outside the world... We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is their in our world?"

"I never thought before, said Tirin unruffled, "of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, 'Look, there's the Moon.' Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth. "Where, then, is Truth? declaimed Bedap, and yawned. "In the hill one happens to be sitting on, said Tirin."

"I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them."

"Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it - because they're afraid of it. They're afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they'll have to redefine what literature is. And they're too damned lazy to do it."

"You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?"

"Am I supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After all, he's just a man ... He's about fifty years old, and he's bald. And I'll bet he has to cut his toenails too like any other man. I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is, he'll be much godlier after he's dead."

"The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names " Mars of the fields and the war; Vesta the fire; Ceres the grain; Mother Tellus the earth; the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the stormcloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren't people. They don't love and hate, they aren't for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live."

"Pride kept her from confiding in the other girls, and caution kept her from confessing to the older women."

"I thought the same thing, exactly. We always say that. you said it--you should have refused to go to Rolny. I said it as soon as I got to Elbow; I'm a free man. I didn't have to come here!...We always think it, and say it, but we don't do it. We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind, like a room where we can come and say, 'I don't have to do anything, I make my own choices, I'm free.' And then we leave the little room in our mind, and go where PDC posts us, and stay till we're reposted."

"Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed."

"I fear liars, and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country well. Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts long enough."

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

"The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new."

"There are no right answers to wrong questions."

"I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character " not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers."

"Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it."