“All life is a rhythm, she said as I sat up. All death is a rhythm suspended, a syncopation before liferesumes.”

“In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, she is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of woman. The ancient, dimorphic form he, once used excl...”

“The dawn of space travel is the dawn of woman.”

“I dont know whether Asimov realized he was saying this as well, but as an old historical materialist, if only as an afterthought, he must have realized that he was saying too: No one here will ever...”

“But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense-stranger than the hallucinations, or the ...”

“In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is ...”

“why are trying so hard to fit in, when you're born to stand out”

“It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.”

“Wanting to be someone else is a waste of who you are”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“A name can't begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that's the magic of names, isn't it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another ...”

“People often lose their names. Names fall into holes or get eaten by wild animals. Sometimes theyre carried away by the wind.”

“Young man, names are powerful things. You dont just go around using them for no reason.”