Living in a world that is valued only as gain, an ever-expanding world-as-frontier that has no worth of its own, no fullness of its own, you live in danger of losing your own worth to yourself. That's when you begin to listen to the voices from the other side, and to ask questions of failure and the dark.

One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.

We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

The machine conceals the machinations.

First sentences are doors to worlds.

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.