"I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details."

"Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone."

"The strength of Shevek's personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable."

"We came, Takver thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that's already between us, the distance of our sex, the differences of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, he comes back...."

"All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world."

"It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye."

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

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

"You shall not go down good twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. 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."

"Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass."

"Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along."

"With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents to drink and be clean and irrigate with, using water mindfully, carefully. They lived in a land that answers greed with drought and death. A difficult land: aloof yet sensitive."

"Fish and visitors stink after three days."

"Stealthily the stars slid forward into nothingness."

"His eyes saved him. What they insisted on seeing and reporting to him took him out of the autism of terror."

"I suspect that the distinction between a maternal and a paternal instinct is scarcely worth making; the parental instinct, the wish to protect, to further, is not a sex-linked characteristic."

"Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development."

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

"Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say,There! That's the truth!"

"I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write."

"She'll die.' 'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive."

"They let us be, here, in the cage of our ignorance."

"BucketI feel so dreamydreamy lazy, crazy sleepylike I want to be therein the doorway, the doorwayor the porch cornerbe sitting, be emptynotdoing not goingan old bucket left therein the porch corner is like I aman old empty bucket somebody left there."

"... there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat."

"A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere."

"Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly."

"I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists' relationship is essentially with their work - not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience."

"He copulated with a number of girls, but copulation was not the joy it ought to be. It was a mere relief of need, like evacuating, and he felt ashamed of it afterward because it involved another person as object."

"If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid."

"Dragons think we are amusing. But they remember Erreth-Akbe. They speak of him as if he were a dragon, not a man."

"For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over."

"Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are."

"But if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of the job to be done and one's ability to do it, then you might say the chief virtue of excellent artists is their modesty...But knowing your limits and going to them isn't arrogance. It's greatness of spirit."

"Without war there are no heroes.""What harm would that be?""Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is."

"This StoneHe went looking for a roadthat doesn't lead to death.He went looking for that roadand found it.It was a stone road.He walked that roadthat doesn't lead to death.He walked on it awhilebefore he stopped,having turned to stone.Now he stands there on that roadthat doesn't lead to deathnot going anywhere.He can't dance.from his eyes stones fall.The rainbow people pass himcrossing that road, long-legged, light-stepping,going from the Four Housesto the dancing in the Five Houses.They pick up his tears.This stone is a tearfrom his eye, this stonegiven me on the mountainby one who died before my birth,this stone, this stone."

"Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing."

"Independence was as far as his mind could reach. Yet I think his mind groped further, towards what he could not see, the body's obscure, inalterable dream of mutuality."

"Under his feet he felt the hillroots going down and down into the dark, and over his head he saw the dry, far fires of the stars. Between, all things were his to order, to command. He stood at the center of the world."

"They can send death at once, but life is slower..."

"To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention."

"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 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. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her."

"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next."

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

"Tenar, I go where I am sent. I follow my calling. It has not yet let me stay in any land for long. Do you see that? I do what I must do. Where I go, I must go alone. So long as you need me, I'll be with you in Havnor. And if you ever need me again, call me. I will come. I would come from my grave if you called me, Tenar! But I cannot stay with you."

"Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark."

"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 power. But it isn't hers, is it? It isn't because she's a woman that she's powerful, but despite it."

"But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power...It must follow knowledge, and serve need."

"Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten."

"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. 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, and very often in our art, the art of words."

"An Odonian's goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive."