You seemed, in your power, as free as man can be. But at what cost? What made you free? And I... I was made, moulded like clay, by the will of the women serving the Old Powers, or serving the men who...
You see, I don’t write the way I was trained to write at the conservatory. I write dysfunctional music.
You must be Arha, or you must be Tenar. You cannot be both.
You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your mot...
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do - they never adapt either.
You can keep up that crap for years. But it finally catches up with you. And then you realise all you've done is save your shit to drown in.
You are beautiful, Tenar said in a different tone. Listen to me, Therru. Come here. You have scars, ugly scars, because an ugly, evil thing was done to you. People see the scars. But they see you, too...
Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer....The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what com...
Writing about our life in the House of Arcamand in the City State of Etra, I fall back into it and see it as I saw it then, from inside and from below, with nothing to compare it to, and as if it were...
Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you...
Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify i...
Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the i...
Wold felt sorry for him, as he often did for young men, who have not seen how passion and plan over and over are wasted, how their lives and acts are wasted between desire and fear.
With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city. Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets...
Why hadn’t she been a detective instead of a goddamn stupid third-class civil rights lawyer? She hated the law. It took an aggressive, assertive personality. She didn’t have it. She had a sneaky, sly,...
Who would be an artist if they did not believe that that happens? If they did not know it happens, because they have felt the god within them use their tongue, their hands? Maybe only once, once in th...
Who do you think is lying to us? Shevek demanded. Placid, Bedap met his gaze. Who, brother? Who but ourselves?
Who am I? Laia muttered to her invisible audience, and they knew the answer and told it to her with one voice. She was the little girl with scabby knees, sitting on the doorstep staring down through t...