No, brother, I'm sane. What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain- you said that! But...
No ideologues, not even religious ones, are going to be happy with Tolkien, unless they manage it by misreading him. For like all great artists he escapes ideology by being too quick for its nets, too...
No era él quien hacía las cosas: las cosas lo hacían a él. Había estado en manos de otra gente. La voluntad no había actuado. No había tenido necesidad de actuar. La voluntad había estado en el comien...
No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it....
My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Hellen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be g...
Most bigots are sincere.
Loss of face for the Commensals, caught lying. You will be a treasure, a long-lost hearth-brother, to King Argaven, Genry. For a while. You must send for your Star Ship at once, at the first chance yo...
Lord Berosty rem ir Ipe came to Thangering Fastness and offered forty beryls and half the year’s yield from his orchards as the price of a Foretelling, and the price was acceptable. He set his questio...
I’d like a poster showing two old people with stooped backs and arthritic hands and time-worn faces sitting talking, deep, deep in conversation. And the slogan would be Old Age Is Not for the Young.
It’s queer that daylight’s not enough. We need the shadows, in order to walk.
It was not that Abbenay was short of power, not with her wind turbines and the earth temperature-differential generators used for heating; but the principle of organic economy was too essential to the...
It was more than dignity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved. The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncar...
It is useless work that darkens the heart.
It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all a...
It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.
In this effort to attain security, independence and privacy of course were suspect....
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s...
In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order.
If your strength is only the other’s weakness, you live in fear,