Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience.
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...
A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One's freedom to choose and to change will be unus...
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
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...
Si continúas así, si sigues huyendo, dondequiera que huyas siempre encontrarás el peligro y el mal, porque es ella la que te lleva, la que elige tu camino. Eres tú quien ha de elegir. Tienes que hosti...
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
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.
We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.
There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having tha...
Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I...
Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we ha...
Orr slept. He dreamed. There was no rub.
My dogs have barked at a beggar tonight and he proves a prince of starlight.
It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.
I was alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark palace, in a strange snow-changed city, in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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.
You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the me...