“Success is somebody else’s failure.”

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.

I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world.

There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool’s caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else’s are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone are rosy.

Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.

I am still encouraged to go on. I wouldn’t know where else to go.

If you can’t be yourself, what’s the point of being anyone else?

Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.

Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can.

Unfortunately sometimes one can’t do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.

In jail I was just like everybody else, I was sitting there praying, feeling caged.