It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.Collection: Hope
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.Collection: Time
Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.Collection: Morning
I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Dreams
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.Collection: Hope
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.Collection: Experience
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.Collection: Truth
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.Collection: Imagination
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.Collection: Technology
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.Collection: Imagination
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.Collection: Hope
To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
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.
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
To oppose something is to maintain it.
There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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.
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.
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.
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever.
I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.
I've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.
He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.
I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.Collection: Romantic
We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn’t an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.Collection: Healing
We read books to find out who we are.Collection: Book
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.Collection: Stories
The story is not in the plot but in the telling.Collection: Stories
Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.Collection: Real
First sentences are doors to worlds.Collection: Firsts
The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.Collection: Country
The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.Collection: Country
To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Stories
If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.Collection: Book
After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Book
What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing.Collection: Country