Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.
Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.
Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however – that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.
What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
What is life without incompatible realities?
Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?
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.