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It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.

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The best I can say, it's like this. A man's in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell ... It's hard and strong, that shell, and it's all full of him. ...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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For discipline is the channel in which our acts run strong and deep; where there is no direction, the deeds of men run shallow and wander and are wast...more

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Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?

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So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.

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...All who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You lost deat...more

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I want to say to the literature teacher who remains wilfully, even boastfully ignorant of a major element of contemporary fiction: you are incompetent...more

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A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and ...more

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Am I supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After all, he's just a man ... He's about fifty years old, and he's bald. And I'll bet ...more

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They have no gods. They work magic, and think they are gods themselves. But they are not. And when they die, they (...) become dust and bone, and thei...more

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One of the rocks in my soulbag, a little grey rock that I had picked up on a certain day in a certain place in the hills above the river in the Silver...more

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Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to...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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He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.