The heavy work requiring muscle and the skilled work with crops and sheep was done by Ged, Shandy, and Tenar, while the two old men who had been there all their lives, his father's men took him about...
The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be (as Nim put it) tied down to childbearing, implies that no one is quite so thoroughly tied down here as women, elsewhere...
Literature is a field a great many men consider theirs by right. Virginia Woolf committed successful competition in that field. She barely escaped the first and most effective punishment--omission fro...
Listen, Tenar. Heed me. You were the vessel of evil. The evil is poured out. It is done. It is buried in its own tomb. You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light, as a l...
Light is the left hand of darknessand darkness the right hand of light.Two are one, life and death, lyingtogether like lovers in kemmer,like hands joined together,like the end and the way.
Laws are made against the impulse a people most fears in itself. Do not kill was the Shing's vaunted single Law. All else was permitted: which meant, perhaps, there was little else they really wanted...
I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer,
It’s a good place for a child, the woods. You don’t learn much about people, but you learn silence. Patience. And that there’s nothing much to fear in the wilderness—less than there is on a farm or in...
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 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 what it looks like and is called. A jail. it is not a front for something else, not a facade, not a pseudonym. It is real, the real thing, the thing behind the words.
It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in wh...
It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end...
It exists, Shevek said, spreading out his hands. It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on whic...
It doesn’t make any difference if his end is good; means are all we’ve got
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 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.
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...