You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light. They could not hide you.
They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted aw...
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual,only evil interesting. This is the trea...
The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.
The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.
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...
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.
Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.The value judgement concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction.Every r...
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...
But if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of the job to be done and one's ability to do it, then you might say the chief virt...
An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap-works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it...
A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't get into me, it is already my deepest self. The poet w...
[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it...
Love doesn't just sit there like a stone it has to be made like bread remade all the time made new.
Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
But you're so strong. I wish I were strong. I just like eating.
I fear liars, and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country well. Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts long enough.
[T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.
This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.