Though Argaven might be neither sane nor shrewd, he had had long practice in the evasions and challenges and rhetorical subtleties used in conversation by those whose main aim in life was the achievem...
This writing doesn't affect reality any more than any writing does; that is to say, indirectly, but considerably.
This story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed, I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why...
They were not victors, he and his kind, not in any way, they were the defeated still, for they had become like their betters.
They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. But I will not believe that. I want the walls down. I want solidarity, human solidarity.
They say one gets used to being a millionaire; so after a year or two a human being begins to get used to being a woman.
They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high produc...
They just came to look, as if she were the Great Tower in Rodarred, or the Canyon of the Tulaevea. A phenomenon, a monument. They were awed, adoring. She snarled at them: Think your own thoughts!
There's one way to make a baby. If you know another, you can do it with somebody else!
There was no more room in the world for whole people, they took up too much space. What she had done to him was only a part of the general program for cutting him and people like him down to size, for...
There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time. As all the stars may be reflected in a round raindrop falling in the night: so too do all the stars reflect the raindrop. The...
Then suddenly he was aware of a man clothed in white who watched him through the falling water of the fountain.
The tongue they speak there is not like any spoken in the Archipelago or the other Reaches, and they are a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired, and fierce, liking the sight of blood and the sm...
The story is the way the story is told.
The sexual cycle averages 26 to 28 days (they tend to speak of it as 26 days, approximating it to the lunar cycle). For 21 or 22 days the individual is somer, sexually inactive, latent. On about the 1...
The quality and virtue of a slave is invisibility. The powerless need to be invisible even to themselves.
The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
The moths look like souls in the underworld,
The most winning characteristic of the rather harsh Cetian temperament was curiosity, inopportune, and inexhaustible curiosity; Cetians died eagerly, curious as to what came next.
The habit of silence is lead on the tongue.