“A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out.”

I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.

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

Hope is a slow business.

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.

And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.

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.

In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.

Fruit of all the kinds that the country produced were laid before him; he ate very little, but from time to time a liquor prepared from cocoa, and of an aphrodisiac nature.

I ate too many Frosted Flakes. I don’t remember what I said last night.

You guys make the rules up, so a foul is a foul. It doesn’t matter if a guy is bigger and stronger. It’s not my fault I ate my Frosted Flakes when I was little, and you ate Wheaties.

Since Eve ate the apple, much depends on dinner.

My mother kept the house clean and we ate good.

I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me,

But if there was a mini-comic here in my hand, I’d read it while I ate my lunch.