I think, Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and cou...
He welcomed isolation with all his heart. It never occurred to him that the reserve he met in Bedap and Tirin might be a response; that his gentle but already formidable hermetic character might form...
He thought, I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
He liked the way she began her fierce, scornful sentences so often with a weak, conciliatory 'well.' She cut the ground out from under them before they ever got going, let them hang unsupported in the...
Had his fear, in fact, been the personal fear that Selver might having learnt the racial hatred, reject him and treat him not as you but as one of them.
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.
Fiction is really often much more useful than lived experience; it takes much less time, costs nothing (from the library), and it comes in a manageable, orderly form. You can understand it. Experience...
But I don’t know what my side is, he thought, as he went back to his chair by the window. The Liberation, of course, yes, but what is the Liberation? Not an ideal, the freedom of the enslaved. Not now...
As for the doctor's mind, though intelligent and certainly well-meaning, it was a jumble of intellectual artifacts even more confusing than all the gadgets, appliances, and coneniences that filled the...
A medida que un hombre adquiere más poder y sabiduría, se le estrecha el camino, hasta que al fin no elige, y hace pura y simplemente lo que tiene que hacer...
A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
I, like Borges, think of heaven as something very like a library
. . chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don't see the difference between what...
His story told of the king’s daughter Cassandra, who foresaw what would happen and tried to prevent the Trojans from letting the great horse into the city, but no one would listen to her: it was a cur...
You have not thought things through, he said. By his standards it was a brutal insult.
You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Fortelling? No...To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
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...
We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain.
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. It's unwise, though, to think you know how it's going to go, or how it's going to end. That's...
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 m...