I’ve never liked the word blog—I suppose it is meant to stand for bio-log or something like that, but it sounds like a sodden tree trunk in a bog, or maybe an obstruction in the nasal passage (Oh, she...
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 puzzled him. He had 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 w...
It might seem strange that on an island fifty miles wide, in a village under cliffs that stare out forever on the sea, a child may grow to manhood never having stepped in a boat or dipped his finger i...
It may remain for us to learn… that our task is only beginning, and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable and unthinkable Time. We may have to l...
It is our suffering that brings us together.
It is our Puritanism, insisting that discipline means repression or punishment, which confuses the subject. To discipline something, in the proper sense of the word, does not mean to repress it, but t...
It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can seperate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that’s already between us, the distance of our sex, the differan...
It goes right back to the idea of the Power of Positive Thinking, which is so strong in America because it fits in so well with the Power of Commercial Advertising and with the Power of Wishful Thinki...
Ini and Aevi were entranced by his description of a curriculum that included farming, cparnetry, sewage reclamation, printing, plumbing, road mending, playwriting, and al the other occupations of the...
In war everybody is a prisoner.
In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirr...
In other ways my story didn’t follow the tradition. Its subversive elements attracted little attention, no doubt because I was deliberately sneaky about them. A great many white readers in 1967 were n...
In many college English courses the words myth and symbol are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every pa...
In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way round: the university conferred superiority on the man.
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 The Tombs of Atuan, the Old Powers, the Nameless Ones, appear as mysterious, ominous, and yet inactive. Arha/Tenar is their priestess, the greatest of all priestesses, whom the Godking himself is s...
Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors beside battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing right do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fantasy is good at thi...
If you write science fiction you can spell things the way you like, sometimes.
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...