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.
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.