When we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we’ve never crossed before.
We broke the world to make it whole...
It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.
My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.
Who knows a man’s name, holds that man’s life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.
Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.
I’ve got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin’s not easy.
Scientific truth will out, you can’t hide the sun under a stone.
I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.
Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.
But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.
A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer’s job is to be its medium.
When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.
Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is.
Oh, never and forever aren’t for mortals, love. But we won’t be parted till I know it’s right that we part.
Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can’t understand that they end in him, but they don’t end with him.
To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.
The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!
The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.