To the Bullock RoserootWhat's the thought you thinkall your life long?It must be a great one,a solemn one, to make you gazethrough the world at it,all your life long.When you have to look aside from i...
They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe i...
There's a saying, Aeneas said: Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts. He spoke wryly. Horses, particularly.
Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a f...
No need to try to find it, said Unroy. The sacredness is there. In thetruth, the pain, the beauty. So that the telling of it is sacred.
In innocence there is no strength against evil [...] but there is strength in it for good.
If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many...
I have this, this gift, I know that; and I know my obligation to it.
I hate complaining to strangers -- you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well.
But I can't say that gratitude was my motive for infringing on the Law of Cultural Embargo. I was not paying my debt to him. Such debts remain owing. Estraven and I had simply arrived at the point whe...
a book is a box of words until you open it.
In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.
We shape each other to be human.
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 cen...
Time says Let there beevery moment and instantlythere is space and the radianceof each bright galaxy.And eyes beholding radiance.And the gnats’ flickering dance.
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 trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual,
The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it w...
The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjec...
The child stared at her or at nothing, trying to breathe, and trying again to breathe, and trying again to breathe.