The prisoner is the jailer's jailer.
In the latter months of his own long sickness the Master Herbal had taught him much of the healer's lore, and the first lesson and the last of all that lore was this: Heal the wound and cure the illne...
All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all...
A book won't move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. A book won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To r...
The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great ha...
What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one musn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...Insofar as...
To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let...
The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a whi...
Orr slept. He dreamed. There was no rub.
Life rises out of death, death rises out of life, in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them all is reborn, the flower of the apple...
Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but Stat...
Love doesn't just sit there like a stone it has to be made like bread remade all the time made new.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.
[T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
Stealthily the stars slid forward into nothingness.
Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.