"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 troubled voice of the water. After a while I moved farther up the hill, where I could hear birds singing near and far in the silence of the trees. The presence of the trees was very strong...The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion."

"I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?"

"All her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars."

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

"I have this, this gift, I know that; and I know my obligation to it."

"A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't "get into" me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.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 storm cloud 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."

"You are rich. You own. We are poor. We lack. You have. We do not have. Everything is beautiful here, only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces. The men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels. There you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit, because our men and women are free possessing nothing. They are free. And you, the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail, each alone, solitary with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes, the wall, the wall."

"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."

"The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I supposed?"

"Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment."

"...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 names. It is a very great thing. Though each of us alone is weak, having that we are strong, stronger than the Powers of the Dark."

"There was something lacking " in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not strong enough to take what was so generously offered. He felt himself dry and arid, like a desert plant, in this beautiful oasis. Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off his soul; the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could not drink."

"Sure, it's simple writing for kids, just as simple as bringing them up."

"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."

"If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that."

"Odo said it all her life. 'Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice!"

"Well," he said slowly, "sometimes there's a passion that comes in its springtime to ill fate or death. And because it ends in its beauty, it's what the harpers sing of and the poets make stories of: the love that escapes the years...."All or nothing, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?"

"Belief in the lie is the life of the lie."

"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 want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit."

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

"In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil."

"...you play the instrument you have."

"Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!"

"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."

"An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap-works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn't work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience."

"Love does not just sit there, like a stone; it had to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."

"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 to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom..."

"The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile."

"Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of its existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering - unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality."

"I do not care what comes after, I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning."

"For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after."

"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."

"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 thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper."

"You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth?"

"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. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus."

"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."

"It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it."

"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."

"The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny."

"I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep."

"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 choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen."

"Life rises out of death, death rises out of life, in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars."

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

"And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this--letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable--but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words."

"Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on."

"But you're so strong. I wish I were strong. I just like eating."

"To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune."

"You always have to defend the imagination against idiots."

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

"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."