Infinite are the arguments of mages,
Indeed it can be seen as our human essence, how few behavioral imperatives we follow. How flexible we are in finding new things to do, new ways to go. How ingeniously, inventively, desperately we seek...
In this they resemble any reasonable being who does an unreasonable thing and justifies it with reasons. War, for example. My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them...
In the big, crowded, noisy room where golden suns swam on the walls and the years and Years were told on golden dials, he searched for the alien, the stranger, his wife.
In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.
In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane – bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Nap...
In Enlad, said Arren after a while, we have a story about the boy whose schoolmasterwas a stone:'Aye?... What did he learn?Not to ask questions.
Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making.
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself - as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to...
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 piano is the opposite of forte, graceful chitchat with strangers is definitely my piano.
If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what ha...
If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passe...
If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and yo...
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 will tell my tale as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that truth is a matter of the imagination.
I think what you mostly do when you find you really are alone is to panic. You rush to the opposite extreme and pack yourself into groups - clubs, teams, societies, types. You suddenly start dressing...
I never know the heron as it flies at first. What is the slow, wide-winged figure in the sky? Then I see it, like a word in a foreign language, like seeing one’s own name written in a strange alphabet...