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'Long ago we parted,' said the slight, still man of the Fiia. 'Longer ago we were one. What we are not, they are. What we are, they are not. Think of the sunlight and the grass and the trees that bear fruit, Semley; think that not all roads that lead down lead up as well.'
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Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
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The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.
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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.
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For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.
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If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
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I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
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The backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.
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Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.
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But maybe you're just as glad he’s not a shrink, eh? Awful to have your spouse analyzing your unconscious desires across the dinner table, eh?
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Greed puts out the sun.
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'She obeys me, but only because she wants to.''It’s the only justification for obedience,' Ged observed.
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The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We can’t stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.
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If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself
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'Is it a wicked thing, then?''I should call it a misunderstanding, rather. A misunderstanding of life. Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.'
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Easy victories aren’t worth winning.
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What is a woman's power then?" she asked. "I don't think we know." "When has a woman power because she's a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while..." "In her house, maybe." She looked around the kitchen. "But the doors are shut," she said, "the doors are locked." "Because you're valuable." "Oh yes. We're precious. So long as we're powerless.
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It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.
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All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.
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Existence is its own justification, need is right.
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Indeed, until she had met Lev at school, it had not occurred to her that anyone might prefer to speak a plain fact rather than a lie that sounded well. People said what suited their purposes, when they were serious; and when they weren’t serious, they talked without meaning anything at all.
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What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. . . . . All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection.
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It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done?
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At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.