Only in silence the word, Only in dark the light, Only in dying life: Bright the hawk's flight On the empty sky.

I’m not dead. I sleep sometimes. Sleep comes very close to death, everyone knows that. The dead walk in dreams, everyone knows that. They come to you alive, and they say things. They walk out of death into the dreams.

“How do I know,” she said at last, “that you are what you seem to be?” “You don't,” Said he. “I don't know what I seem, to you.”

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. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

The fire danced in her eyes. The flames swam, flared up, sank away, brightened again against the sooty stone, against the dark sky, against the pale sky, the gulfs of evening, the depths of air and light beyond the world.

You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance.

I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps.

Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it’s then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.

A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls.

But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.

Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, “the love of nature” seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world.

And after a while he saw at the faint outermost edge of the light a shadow that came towards him over the sand. At first it was shapeless, but as it drew nearer it took on the look of a man.

I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is, he'll be much godlier after he's dead.

I was in too much haste, and now have no time left.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

I spoke your true name. It's not what I thought it would be. And I don't feel easy about it. As if I'd left something unfinished. But it is your name. If it betrays you, then that's the truth of it.

Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running.

You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.

To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.

A hero whose heroism consists of killing people is uninteresting to me, and I detest the hormonal war orgies of our visual media, the mechanical slaughter of endless battalions of black-clad, yellow-toothed, red-eyed demons.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

Omelas already exists: no need to build it or choose it. We already live here –in the narrow, foul, dark prison we let our ignorance, fear, and hatred build for us and keep us in, here in the splendid, beautiful city of life...

The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.

What good is power when you're too wise to use it?