“I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.”

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.

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.

Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom.

But perhaps when you were too obedient, and did not do openly what others did, and were quiet in church and hard-working at school.

An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,

God will never plant the seed of his life upon the soil of a hard, unbroken spirit.

You’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.

Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle.

Film-making is a physically hard job.

Then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.