Ursula K. Le Guin

She could not have been born gray. Hercolor, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixednature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people's world. She had not been born.

This StoneHe went looking for a roadthat doesn't lead to death.He went looking for that roadand found it.It was a stone road.He walked that roadthat doesn't lead to death.He walked on it awhilebefore he stopped,having turned to stone.Now he stands there on that roadthat doesn't lead to deathnot going anywhere.He can't dance.from his eyes stones fall.The rainbow people pass himcrossing that road, long-legged, light-stepping,going from the Four Housesto the dancing in the Five Houses.They pick up his tears.This stone is a tearfrom his eye, this stonegiven me on the mountainby one who died before my birth,this stone, this stone.

If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life.

It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries;but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps at them too soon, hurries, grabs. She doesn__ wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because she__ a writer; she wants to say this, and tell people that, and show people something else _ things she knows, her ideas, her opinions, her beliefs, important things _ but she doesn__ wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word.

I have learned how I work best, and that is something that, if you're going to be a professional writer, you should be noticing: under what circumstances you work at your best, and to not get yourself cornered into writing in a way that doesn't let you do your best.

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist__ 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__ recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It__ none of their business. All they__e trying to do is tell you what they__e like, and what you__e like -- what__ 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__ 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]

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing.

The strength of Shevek's personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable.

Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.

I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write.

They can send death at once, but life is slower...

This concern, feebly called 'love of nature', seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.

For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.

The premise is: everybody's like me and we all think alike.The corollary is: people who don't think like me don't matter.

Her despair grew so great that it burst her breast open and like a bird of fire shattered the stone and broke out into the light of day--the light of day, faint in her windowless room.

But she knew, though very vaguely, that she was crying, because hope hurts terribly when it breaks through the resignation in which you have lived for days.

What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair_Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.

Up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society, and its rules, as he from his.