What is his purpose, then?” “I don’t know. Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part.
To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution.
It takes a while to spoil a world, but it can be done.
A warm body sighed in the darkness inside the little bright object balanced elegantly in the orbit of the moon.
To him a thinking man’s job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect.
All Galileo said, all Darwin said, was, “It doesn’t have to be the way we thought it was.
But the human being likes to be challenged, seeks freedom in adversity.
The old farfetchers’ motto: Opinion ends reception.
As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep. I was not sleepy, yet. I would go east to the Fastnesses, and gather information from the Foretellers, perhaps.
In other ways my story didn’t follow the tradition. Its subversive elements attracted little attention, no doubt because I was deliberately sneaky about them. A great many white readers in 1967 were not ready to accept a brown-skinned hero. But they weren’t expecting one. I didn’t make an issue of it, and you have to be well into the book before you realize that Ged, like most of the characters, isn’t white.
The dead are dead. The great and mighty go their way unchecked. The only hope in the world lies in the people of no account.
Rid yourself from the idea of earning, the idea of deserving, and you will be able to think.
Alas, I had no power, at that time, to combat the flat refusal of many cover departments to put people of color on a book jacket. So, through many later, lily-white Geds, Ruth Robbins’s painting for the first edition – the fine, strong profile of a young man with copper-brown skin – was, to me, the book’s one true cover.
The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!” “Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical. You see, we have neither prey nor enemy, on Anarres. We have only one another. There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.
The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human. We.
I’d like a poster showing two old people with stooped backs and arthritic hands and time-worn faces sitting talking, deep, deep in conversation. And the slogan would be “Old Age Is Not for the Young.
One keeps oneself neat out of mere decency mere sanity, awareness of other people. And finally even that goes, and one dribbles unashamed.
Despite what some adults seem to think, teenagers are fully human.
Honorifics and meaningless ritual phrases of greeting, leave-taking, permission-asking, and false gratitude, please, thank you, you’re welcome, goodbye, fossil relics of primitive hypocrisy – all were stumbling blocks to truthfulness between producer-consumers.
A key is a little thing next to the door that it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked.