You're a respectable woman, dearie, and her reputation is a woman's wealth.Her wealth, Tenar repeated in the same blank way; then she said it again: Her wealth. Her treasure. Her hoard. Her value...
You can't change anything from outside it. Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview, you see the pattern. What's wrong, what's missing. You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have to...
What to make of a diminished thing?
What can you do to evil but refuse it? Not pretend it isn’t there, but look at it, and know it, and refuse it. Punishment, what is punishment? Getting even, schoolboy stuff. The Bible God, vengeance i...
We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
We don’t count relatives much; we are all relatives, you see.
Was he leaving home, or going home?
Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work. The judgment that a work is complete—this is what I meant to do, and I stand by it—can come only from the writer, and...
This concern, feebly called '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 u...
They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
There's a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It's like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.'She spoke if i...
There must be darkness to see the stars.
The tree said in its rooted being, All my leaves are seen, but one, this one in the darkness cast by all the others. This one leaf I keep secret to myself. Who will see it in the darkness of my leaves...
The really terrible thing about being young is the triviality
The presence of females was oppressive to them all. It seemed to them that lately the world was full of girls. Everywhere they looked, waking or asleep, they saw giris. They had all tried copulating w...
The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
The body is an arrangement in spacetime, a patterning, a process; the mind is a process of the body, an organ, doing what organs do: organize. Order, pattern, connect. . . . an immensely flexible tech...