“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― The Left Hand of Darkness
― The Left Hand of Darkness
“There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
― The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
― The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
“I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.”
― The Left Hand of Darkness
― The Left Hand of Darkness
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. 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.”
― The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
― The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
“Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.”
― The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
― The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
irem’s 2025 Year in Books
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