245 quotes
Easy victories aren’t worth winning.
The Eye of the Heron (1978)
There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.
Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989)
I expect people who don’t look like me not to be like me, a reasonable expectation, as expectations go; but it makes my mind slow to admit that people who look like me may not be like me.
Changing Planes (2003)
Mr. Ai, we’ve seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they’d seem the same to us.
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
I was afraid I’d fail. So I didn’t work.
Orsinian Tales (1976)
Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
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.
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)
We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God’s truth, the universe at once began to exist.
City of Illusions (1967)
We're social animals, but we crave solitude to make our souls
A Very Good American Novel (2013)
He knew that in so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying. It would be foolish to worry about anything while one died.
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)
She was not so naive as to think there was any necessary relation between religion and morality, or that if there was a relation it was likely to be a benevolent one.
The Telling (2000)
Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.
Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989)
The High-Intelligence Life Forms of the planet, of which there were at least three species, all of low technological achievement, they would ignore or enslave or extirpate, whichever was most convenient. For to an aggressive people only technology mattered.
Rocannon’s World (1966)
A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.
The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
We read books to find out who we are.
“But you knew them to be evil men—”
“Was I to join them therefore? To let their acts rule my own? I will not make their choices for them, nor will I let them make mine for me!”
The Farthest Shore (1972)
"We're not outside the world, yoz. You know? We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see?"
The Telling (2000)
They say Mars absolves the warrior from the crimes of war, but those who were not the warriors, those for whom the war was said to be fought, even though they never wanted it to be fought, who absolves them?
Lavinia (2008)
It may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)