“The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .”

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early.

You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.

For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… By using words well they strengthen their souls.

To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.

I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.

And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.

What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘

We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people .

While we read a novel, we are insane-bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.

What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it.

The light is the left hand of darkness.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Kitchen-table start-ups and local entrepreneurs will find they have major new opportunities opened to them, as they gain easier and quicker access for their goods and services into one of the world’s largest markets.

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial.

Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.

A sensible man ought to think about that well being is the best of human blessings, and find out how by his personal thought to derive profit from his sicknesses.

I wanted to take up guitar because playing piano is a little harder. Carrying a keyboard around is harder, and finding a real piano is much harder, and I wanted to play live more, so I figured a guitar would be easier to carry around.

Some of us might find happiness if we quit struggling so desperately for it.

Your field of focus determines what you find in life.

As you will find in multivariable calculus, there is often a number of solutions for any given problem.