The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful the life is, is from the vantage point of death.
The unknown, said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action.
The room smelled of books, that subtle smell which to some is stuffy and to others intoxicating, and it was silent.
The premise is: everybody's like me and we all think alike.The corollary is: people who don't think like me don't matter.
The poet Gary Snyder’s finely unpoetic image of composting is useful here. Stuff goes into the writer, a whole lot of stuff, not notes in a notebook but everything seen and heard and felt all day ever...
The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence.
The machine conceals the machinations.
The law of evolution is that the strongest survives! Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical. You see, we have neith...
The insistent permissiveness of the late twentieth century had produced fully as much sex-guilt and sex-fear in its heirs as had the insistent repressiveness of the late nineteenth century. Orr
The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on. Even
The first thing I can remember clearly is writing the way into the secret room.
The Yomeshta would say that man’s singularity is his divinity.’ ‘Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be the cults of dynamic, aggressive...
The Encyclopedia Planaria, in forty-four volumes, is not portable, and after all, what is entirely reliable unless it's dead?
The Akan system is a spiritual discipline with spiritual goals, but they're exactly the same goals it seeks for bodily and ethical well-being.
Take care, Tenar, he said.
Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism doe...
Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.
Somehow is a super-weasel, a word that betrays that the author didn’t want to bother thinking out the story—Somehow
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 he worked.He lost weight; he walked light on the earth. Lack of physical labor, lack of variety of occupation, lack of social and sexual intercourse, none of these appeared to him as lacks, but as...