Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies...
Large, general questions about meaning, etc., can only be answered with generalities, which make me uncomfortable, because it is so hard to be honest when you generalize. If you skip over all the deta...
La libertad es una carga pesada, extraña y abrumadora para el espíritu que ha de llevarla. No es cómoda. No es un regalo que se recibe, sino una elección que se hace, y la elección puede ser difícil.
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 nothing to do with eternity, said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love ea...
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 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...
Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?
Interruptions were sometimes more frequent than statements. The process, compared to a well-managed executive conference, was a slab of raw beef compared to a wiring diagram. Raw beef, however, functi...
Infinite are the arguments of mages,
In a State, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful—another piston in the great machine?
In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order.
If you can see a thing whole, he said, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives...But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the...
If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub.
I'm a part of it. Not separate from it. I walk on the ground and the ground's walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world.
I wrote an essay about the rhythm of Tolkien’s writing in The Lord of the Rings. Short rhythms repeated form long rhythms; there’s a cyclical repetition in his work which I think is part of why it tot...
I will not go with you, nor will I be a slave of any Greek. The Earth Mother keeps me here. And you must go a long way for a long time, you must go, my sweet husband until at last, you come to the Wes...