As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wiz...
I saw that you can’t do anything for anybody. We can’t save each other. Or ourselves.What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You’re denying brotherhood, Shevek! the tall girl cried.No—no, I’m...
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....
He knew that he was very near achieving the General Temporal Theory that the Ioti wanted so badly for their spaceflight and their prestige. He knew also that he had not achieved it and might never do...
Kafamda bu dusunceler gecip duruyordur, kalbim parcalanmisti, perisandi, cevremdeki insanlarla sevinmek istiyor, ama bunu yapamiyordum. Kendimi bir hain gibi hissediyordum, o buyuk hatayi ben yapmisim...
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...
They have no gods. They work magic, and think they are gods themselves. But they are not. And when they die, they (...) become dust and bone, and their ghosts whine on the wind a little while till the...
There are talking dogs all over the place, unbelievably boring they are, on and on and on about sex and shit and smells, and smells and shit and sex, and do you love me, do you love me, do you love me...
By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included. The ones who can’t do magic. The ones who don’t have s...
The fact that the Hegnish have absolutely no interest in any people except themselves can also cause offense, or even rage. Foreigners exist. That is all the Hegnish know about them, and all they care...
Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes....
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 thei...
Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the k...
Why is it that if you say you don’t enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren’t going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as loathing it?
From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be...
Up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society, and its rules, as he from his.
The fundamental unity of the Sequence and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe. How could he have stare...
It is a great deal to ask of a kitten, to defend a man against the armies of the dead.
And he began to see the truth, that [he] 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...