The Old Powers of earth are not for men to use. They were never given into our hands, and in our hands they work only ruin. Ill means, ill end. I was not drawn here, but driven here, and the force tha...
That silent vastness of fire and ice that said in enormous letters of black and white DEATH, DEATH, written right across a continent. The sledge pulled like a feather, and we laughed with joy.
Talking about the meaning of a story, we need to be careful not to diminish it, impoverish it. A story can say different things to different people. It may have no definitive reading. And a reader may...
Nusuth
Never had a gift but one, to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act. I had thought that foresight lost, last year in Erhenrang, and never to be regained. A great delight it was to...
My heart told me incontrovertibly that neither gender could go far without the other. So, in my story, neither the woman nor the man can get free without the other.
Lot. But she never could keep off the hard drugs, she was hooked. She’d be off for a year and then bingo. She got through the Plague, but when she was thirty-eight she got a dirty needle, and it kille...
It is strange, exceedingly strange, to know that one’s life has been fulfilled. Yet
If I wanted to be the center of the universe I’d have a dog.
His heart going hard.
He thought no more of performing the lesser arts of magic than a bird thinks of flying. Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.
For though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life.
Figurines and souvenirs and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement.
Don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like...
But you're not a traitor, you've merely been the tool of one. I don't punish tools. They do harm only in the hands of a bad workman.
Assumed that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work—his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy—and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and...
A man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or ha...
[T]he status of women in a society is a pretty reliable index of the degree of civilization of that society.
[H.G. Wells said] that his method was to trick his reader into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds. Such prestidigitation is a characte...
You see, I don’t write the way I was trained to write at the conservatory. I write dysfunctional music.