So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of agai...
So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.
She’s pious. By that word I meant responsible, faithful to duty, open to awe.
Page 15, paperback version by Virago Press 1997: ... Let me ask you this, Mr Ai: do you know, by your own experience, what patriotism is? ‘No’, I said, shaken by the force of the intese personality su...
Owning is owing, having is hoarding.
On top of pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul.
On the dock Yarrow stood and watched them go, as sailors’ wives and sisters stand on all the shores of all Earthsea watching their men go out on the sea, and they do not wave or call aloud, but stand...
My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators...
Most bigots are sincere.
Meaning in art isn’t the same as meaning in science. The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isn’t changed by who reads it, or when, or where. The meaning...
Kırbaçlarını, para ve yolculuk hakkı için kürekçilik yapanların sırtına hiç indirmiyorlardı, ama kimisi kırbaçlanan, kimisi de kırbaçlanmayan bir mürettebat arasında pek arkadaşlık ortamı oluşturulama...
It's your nature to be Tirin, and my nature to be Shevek, and our common nature to be Odonians, responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our freedom. To avoid it, would be to lose our fr...
It's not death that allows us to understand one another, but poetry.
It was the idea of writing with a specific audience in mind or a specific age of reader that scared me off.
It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.
If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home. Takver
If you can see a thing whole, he said, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you loos...
If you can see a thing whole, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planet,lives...But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. Yo...
If there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind...
I've been looking only at what's to be done next and forgetting why we're doing it.