"“I was ordained,” said the preacher. “No one ordains artists. They ordain themselves.” Just as Taleswapper had expected. The preacher retreated to authority as soon as he feared his ideas could not stand on their own merit. Reasonable argument was impossible when authority became the arbiter."

"I always tell what I believe. Whether it's true, I'm no more sure than any man."

"The only true vision comes not from God but from the inmost recesses of the human mind."

"It's plain that if I married you for brains I was plumb cheated."

"She grunted. “Nothing unusual?” “That’s right.” “Well, if you ask me, that’s pretty unusual right there, if a body was smart enough to notice it.”"

"Land was what they wanted, as if the mere ownership of dirt could turn a peasant into a squire."

"The billion billion paths of his life lay open before him, waiting for his first choices, for the first changes in the world around him to eliminate a million futures every second."

"That's the way it was then, you see. Folks noticed other people's trouble every bit as quick as if it was their own."

"They won't be required to sacrifice anything in order to belong to your assembly. A religion that is all sweetness, but no light; all form, but no substance; all tradition, but no precept."

"Just because you know I had no other choice doesn't make the anger go away. I understand that. But you're a man now. You can put away these childish things."

"The doctrine he was going to be teaching, starting tonight, was not the sort of ideology that would stir souls; no one would die for this religion. It would only attracts converts by promising a return to old tradition and by seeming to be the religion of the future."

"Wanting to is the whole lesson; all the rest is practice."

"It occurred to me that if my friends were loathsome, perhaps I needed to learn from my enemies."

"Which is the greater wrong? To hurt the unforgiving one, or hurt the one who has forgiven all?"

"That's one of those questions, whether human beings are really capable of change, or if all seeming changes are really a matter of framing the existing character in a different moral situation."

"Don't you hate it when somebody knows you better than you know yourself?"

"Law can change how people behave when others are watching — that's all."

"You always do that. Make all the questions harder. I make them truer."

"If a father commands a son to commit a crime so terrible that the son can't do it and live with himself, then is it betrayal for the son to disobey his father?"

"Only boys were so foolish that they actually believed their arguments were their reasons."

"Boys always argued as if they knew then had the forces of logic on their side, even when they were being completely irrational."

"I have no secret thoughts... Or rather, they're not secret because I've withheld them — if they're unknown, it's because no one asked."

"Maybe if I could bear my life as it is for one day, for one hour, for one minute, I could forget my wish to be something else."

"Humans, in order to rise above the animals, had learned how to convert themselves into nothing more than organs or limbs or even disposable fingernails and hair of a larger metaphorical organism."

"I'll be dead and you'll think about this day and wonder which of us was more the slave, you or me!"

"What difference does it make, whether we keep our silence because [they] force us or because we're afraid they might force us?"

"He isn't insane, he's simply as trapped in his life as I am in mine. That makes us friends."

"Out of respect for custom he treats me as if all women were equally worthless. He gives custom more respect than he gives me."

"We can wash people in the water all we want, but we can never wash their parents out of their hearts."

"Today, I saw a spark of decency. Let's blow on that spark and give it fuel."

"We all choose our own teachers, don't we? I wonder if our choice of teacher shows anything about what our lives will be."

"Most of the things people say they remember they only imagine anyways."

"I believe in everything that seems true to me right now. I just refuse to be surprised when some of those things I believe in now turn out to be false later."

"I don't mind dying before you do. In fact, I rather prefer it that way."

"Wishful thinking gives false gods to people who hunger for gods, but those who yearn for a world with no gods are no less likely to fall victim to their own wishful thinking."

"Sometimes those who care for the whole community must act in a way that harms the individual. For a good man it never becomes easy and he avoids it when he can; but when people need him to be harsh, he will be harsh indeed, and he won't shrink from it, he'll do it with his own hand and let it be known what he does."

"Haven't you ever seen a 3-year-old when he makes a foolish blunder? He looks at whatever child or adult is nearby and screams at him "Look at what you made me do!" That's the moral universe that [they] always lived in."

"What cannot be healed has been healed. What was lost forever has been found. Therefore let that which cannot be forgiven be forgiven."

"He hated the way they thought. He hated the way they didn't think. It was hard to imagine which of them he hated more."

"Religion isn't always pretty. Especially viewed from the outside, by an unbeliever."

"You're the only one that I would be glad to be close to forever, because all your secrets are bright and good and I love you for them."

"May the day when you need courage never come. Even as she said it, though, she knew the day would come."

"That's what survival means, for me. I thought it was a matter of staying alive, but it isn't. Nobody lives forever anyway. It's how you're remembered. It's what your children thought of you, what they think of you after you're dead. That's survival."

"Frozen, right? But to others, it looks like you're calm as could be. That's why some of the others tease you so mercilessly sometimes. They think you're made of stone, and they want to break in and touch the human feelings. They just don't know that when you seem most stony, that's when you're the most frightened and breakable."

"Don't lie to me! Don't seem so normal when I know you have cut yourself off from me in your heart! If you can put on our affectionate closeness like a mask, then I'll never be able to take joy in it again."

"Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn't mean the rest of us do."

"The barrier was only in my mind — which is true of this barrier as well. The more firmly I try to cross the barrier, the more firmly I'm rejected. Well, maybe it's the intention to cross the boundary that pushes me away."

"I acted like a human male. When I act like a human male it doesn't make me less human, it just makes me less female."

"Wasting our time? This is a waste of time, to live in peace and plenty with my wife and children? May I waste the rest of my life, then."