“The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”

I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.

To have a choice at all is to be privileged.

A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.

Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit.

Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.

Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died.

But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over.

Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music.

We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.

Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.

Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.

It is no harder for anyone to test this than it is for me to say it is false, since no one is prevented from counting teeth.

I’m a father, a son, and a grandson, and if anyone messed with my wife, mom, or grandmother, and if the law didn’t care about it, what would I do? Would I be defined by that action?

Strength is not nearly as important as desire. I don’t think you can teach anyone desire. I think it’s a gift. I don’t know why I have it, but I do.

Anyway, I just haven’t been able to find any humanity in any Republican candidate ever in my entire life.

I’m not going to impugn anyone’s integrity. I’m not going to attack their character. And, in fact, I will happily praise both Donald Trump and Marco Rubio as men who I admire, as people who I’m not going to go personal with them.

Anyone else has to come upstairs and see the Shogun. I’m still the Shogun.

I have my ups and my downs like anyone. All I can do is be me.

Don’t let anyone turn you into a slave.