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

Success is somebody else’s failure.

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.

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.

As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.

The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.

Well, we think that time “passes,” flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see.

The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own.

No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the back either. Just refuse to bear them.

I fell so many times and got back up. I been through the toughest times with my family, but I’m still standing.

I’m going back to the old Shaq. I was normal last year – I was an earthling last summer. I had to go back to my alien roots.

I’m proud to have been a Yankee. But I have found more happiness and contentment since I came back home to San Francisco than any man has a right to deserve. This is the friendliest city in the world.

The very old certainly do not go back on lunch remains but they do bite back at old conversational topics.

That, for me, actually is the most important thing about doing a period film is trying to make these people as lovable as they are back then.

ISIS says they want to go back and reject modernity? Well, I think we should help them. We ought to bomb them back to the Stone Age.

I remember being about six years old, for the first day of school, and sitting in the back of a Chrysler, pretending to cry while listening to Tracy Chapman.