There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they...
The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.
The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great ha...
Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I...
My dogs have barked at a beggar tonight and he proves a prince of starlight.
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.
It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.
It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
I was alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark palace, in a strange snow-changed city, in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world.
I am offered the Grand Inquisitor's choice. Will you choose freedom without happiness, or happiness without freedom? The only answer one can make, I think, is: No.
His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate. He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, cutting...
Fact is one of our finest fictions.
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...
Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
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 virt...
As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring...
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...
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 w...
You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth?
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.