Being an irreligious puritan and a rational mystic, I think it’s irresponsible to let a belief think for you or a chemical dream for you.
They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned. They were intelligent, their minds were already disciplined to the clarity of science, and they were sixteen years old. But at this point the pleasure of the argument ceased for Shevek, as it had earlier for Kvetur. He was disturbed.
Lovecraft dangles like a rabbit from the jaws of his unconscious.
Our border now is no line between two hills, but the line our planet makes in circling the Sun.
On the second night all creatures woke, and the sleepless cricket was silent suddenly. The thunder spoke from ridge to ridge, from canyon to canyon, far, then nearer. Darkness split wide open to reveal what it hides. Only for a moment can the eyes of the creatures see the world in that awful light.
Our finest method of organized forgetting is called discovery.
A writer who wants to write good stuff needs to read great stuff. If you don’t read widely, or read only writers in fashion at the moment, you’ll have a limited idea of what can be done with the English language.
If I’m pushed, I will push back. And I’ve been pushed quite a lot.
As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage.
She couldn’t be a hero in the hero-tale sense. Not even in a fantasy? No. Because to me, fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality.
My enemies must nominate themselves; I have no interest at all in making, finding, or knowing them.
There are monsters and leviathans and chimeras in the human mind; they are psychic facts. Dragons are one of the truths about us. We have no other way of expressing that particular truth about us. People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
You see, I don’t write the way I was trained to write at the conservatory. I write dysfunctional music.
I wish we could stop using the word belief in matters of fact, leaving it where it belongs, in matters of religious faith and secular hope. I believe we’d avoid a lot of unnecessary pain if we did so.
To believe that our beliefs are permanent truths which encompass reality is a sad arrogance. To let go of that belief is to find safety.
He felt disinclined to move. To move would disturb the perfect, stable moment, the balance of the world. The winter light along the ceiling was beautiful beyond expression. He.
But the fact is that, starting with Plato’s Republic in Philosophy 1-A when I was seventeen, I read utopias as novels. Actually, I still read everything as novels, including history, memoir, and the newspaper.
In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn’t any. Not from intellectual excellence, he hasn’t any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That’s the power structure he’s part of, and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind.
He took pleasure in her inconsequential talk just as he did in the sunshine and the snow.
I’m a part of it. Not separate from it. I walk on the ground and the ground’s walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world.