If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.
I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
True understanding is the spur of genius.
He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
George, it’s impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.
Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?
The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.
Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.
A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They’d rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.
It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.
There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.
If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It’s only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.
We read books to find out who we are.
I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people.
That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.
Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it; it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun’s first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches.