"If I were omnipotent and omnibenevolent I wouldn't be so damn ineffable."
"I'm only fifteen. I'm not sure I ever want to get married. I'm neither messing around while waiting nor looking for some "real thing". What I want is much more complicated. I want somebody to talk about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn't we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.) I'm not looking for romance. Lord Peter and Harriet would seem a pretty good model to me. I wonder if Wim has read Sayers?"
"I had said that Le Guin's worlds were real because her people were so real, and he said yes, but the people were so real because they were the people the worlds would have produced. If you put Ged to grow up on Anarres or Shevek in Earthsea, they would be the same people, the backgrounds made the people, which of course you see all the time in mainstream fiction, but it's rare in SF."
"And there's no sex, hardly any love stuff at all, in Middle Earth, which always made me think, yes, the world would be better off without it."
"On the one hand, Gramma and Grampar never mentioned sex at all. They must have done it, or they wouldn’t have had Auntie Teg and my mother, but I don’t think they did it more than twice. Then there’s the way they talk about sex in school and in church. And there’s no sex, hardly any love stuff at all, in Middle Earth, which always made me think yes, the world would be better off without it."
"You can never be sure where you are with magic."
"It’s lovely when writers I like like each other."
"Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn't subject to scientific analysis, and it's not supposed to be real but it's pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic."
"magic can make things happen before you do it. It can make things have happened."
"It isn't really magic, except that it is. It's not magic that reaches into the world ands changes things. It's all inside my body. I thought, sitting there, that everything is magic. Using things connects them to you, being in the world connects you to the world, the sun streams down magic and people and animals and plants grow from sunlight and the world turns and everything is magic."
"I wish magic was more dramatic"
"You can't do magic with books unless they're very special copies."
"I'm so glad I have my own copy. I can read them again and again. I can read them again and again on trains, all my life, and every time I do I'll remember today and it will connect up. (Is that magic?)"
"Magic isn’t inherently evil. But it does seem to be terribly bad for people."
"You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That's because it doesn't happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That's what it is."
"One of the things I've always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you'd never have thought about before."
"I will laugh about this one day, I told myself. I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can't imagine them properly now."
"You couldn’t get worse food, or food more detached from nature, if you tried. If you have an apple, you’re connected to an apple tree. If you have a dish of set custard and half a glace cherry you’re not connected to anything."
"Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization."
"Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization. Libraries really are wonderful. They’re better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts."
"Trees are what paper was, and wants to be."
"There's a way that money is freedom, but it isn't money, it's that money stands for having a choice."
"This school is enough to make anyone a communist."
"The thing with dying, well, with death really, is that there's a difference between being someone who knows they can really die at any time and someone who doesn't."
"I found myself being helped down to the car. That sort of help is actually a hindrance. If you ever see someone with a walking stick, that stick, and their arm, are actually a leg."