The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.
The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.
Paradise is for those who make paradise.
First sentences are doors to worlds.
Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.
No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience.
Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
My Real Children starts quietly, then suddenly takes you on two roller-coaster rides at once, swooping dizzily through a double panorama and ending in a sort of super Sophie’s Choice. A daring tour de force.
There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.
All makers must leave room for acts of the spirit.
I don’t want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It’s just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being.
Even a poet cannot get everything right.
Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.
The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.
We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
Besides, when you say you’re a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it’s kind of irresistible.
Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced.
All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.