245 quotes
A man, he walked with men across a barren plain blue with flowers in brief April; they shared with him their anger, their barren helpless obduracy and the brief blue fire of their anger.
Orsinian Tales (1976)
What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
The Farthest Shore (1972)
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)
It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
But maybe you're just as glad he’s not a shrink, eh? Awful to have your spouse analyzing your unconscious desires across the dinner table, eh?
The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.
Tales from Earthsea (2001)
It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.
Tales from Earthsea (2001)
Young he was not, so that one had to call him old, but the word did not suit him.
The Farthest Shore (1972)
Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.
The Word for World Is Forest (1972)
He resolved not to speak again until he had controlled his temper.
The Farthest Shore (1972)
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
The Farthest Shore (1972)
And fourteen—fourteen is such a fearful age, when you find out so fast what you’re capable of being, but also what a toll the world expects.
Orsinian Tales (1976)
There’s seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.
The Other Wind (2001)
A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist can’t hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.
The Dispossessed (1974)
A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
The juniper-scented liquor had volatilized his thoughts; he should be thinking that madness caused this man to call himself a king, but was thinking rather that kingship had driven this man mad.
City of Illusions (1967)
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989)
Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.
City of Illusions (1967)
He felt that sense of being necessary which is the burden and reward of parenthood.
The Dispossessed (1974)
Where my guides lead me in kindness
I follow, follow lightly,
and there are no footprints
in the dust behind us.
The Telling (2000)