Michelle W

“Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.

The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like -- what’s going on -- what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming another third of it spent in telling lies. [Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness]”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“And so, because he won't let himself be hurt, he does wrong to those he loves best. And then he sees that, and after all, it hurts him.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Eye of the Heron

“This skin, this hair, all this outside stuff. It isn't me. It's just my package. It's like the wrapper around the sweet; it isn't the sweet itself. What we really are is all inside the package. All our feelings. All our good moods and bad moods. All our ideas, our cleverness, our love, that's what a person really is.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch

“the theorem of incompleteness . . . [shows] there is nothing on this level of existence that can fully explain this level of existence.”
― Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers