245 quotes
You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit or, it is nowhere.
The Dispossessed (1974)
A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.
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.
Lavinia (2008)
She knew it, but she did not want to know it.
Tales from Earthsea (2001)
There’s no way to use power for good.
Tales from Earthsea (2001)
For heroes do not make history—that is the historians’ job—but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war.
Orsinian Tales (1976)
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing!
The Dispossessed (1974)
Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens.
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)
Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
It seemed, at least, that they had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
City of Illusions (1967)
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.
The Dispossessed (1974)
They prevented men from doing anything. But they did nothing themselves. They did not rule, they only blighted.
City of Illusions (1967)
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989)
If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don’t marry and have kids, and above all, don’t die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989)
Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger.
City of Illusions (1967)
“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.”
The Dispossessed (1974)
How could anybody think this man was sick? All right, so he had funny dreams. That was better than being plain mean and hateful, like about one quarter of the people she had ever met.
The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind, it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument.
The Dispossessed (1974)
Sometimes one’s very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.
The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)