“The word he used was not “wallowing,” there being no animals on Anarres to make wallows; it was a compound, meaning literally “coating continually and thickly with excrement.” The flexibility and precision of Pravic lent itself to the creation of vivid metaphors quite unforeseen by its inventors.”

“Boris Pasternak said that poetry makes itself from the relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words.”

“Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison.”

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”

“All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apartfrom older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn fromcertain great dominants of our contemporary life -- science, all the sciences,and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them.Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, analternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is ametaphor.A metaphor for what?If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all thesewords, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and usedup my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly,that the truth is a matter of the imagination.”

“A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.”