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I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ig...more

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Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the love of nature" seemed to Shevek to be something mu...more

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I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

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The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regar...more

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To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.

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All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither h...more

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A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.

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The king was pregnant.

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The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future - indeed Schrödinger most ...more

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On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a ...more

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None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or s...more

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The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not p...more

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...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and ...more

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He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.

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A lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their children enjoyed my books but of course they never ...more