He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorgi...
He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He
He stopped and after a while went on. 'Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices muct be made. When I was young I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leap...
He seemed not to know the uses of silence.
He knew that insofar as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
He gave way to the fear that had come with her, the sense of the breaking of promises, the incoherence of Time. He broke.
He felt disinclined to move. To move would disturb the perfect, stable moment, the balance of the world. The winter light along the ceiling was beautiful beyond expression. He
He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood...
Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive
Grain grows best in shit...
Go to bed; tired is stupid.
For those who seek allegory, it must be maddening. (It must be allegory! Of course Frodo is Christ! - or is Gollum Christ?) for those whose grasp on reality is so tenuous that they crave ever-increasi...
For the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest.
For heroes do not make history—that is the historian’s job—but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war.
Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehens...
Farei meu relatório como se contasse uma história, pois quando criança aprendi, em meu planeta natal, que a Verdade é uma questão de imaginação. O fato mais concreto pode fraquejar ou triunfar no esti...
Even among writers, not all seem to share my enjoyment of pursuing a word or a usage through the dictionaries and the wastebaskets. If I start doing it aloud in public, some of them look at me with ho...
Estraven stood there in harness beside me looking at that magnificent and unspeakable desolation. 'I'm glad I have lived to see this,' he said.I have felt as he did. It is good to have an end to journ...
Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after semicolons, and another...