Cultural shock was nothing much compared to the biological shock I suffered as a human male among human beings who were, five-sixths of the time, hermaphroditic neuters.
People had huddled back into the old core of the city; and once the suburbs had been looted, they burned. Like Moscow in 1812, acts of God or vandalism: they were no longer wanted, and they burned.
Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.
The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business.
It’s nothing to do with eternity,” said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. “All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?
Little children are stoical. They cry over bumps, but they take the big things as they come, they don’t whine like so many adults.
Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.” And.
A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
I was dying of thirst when you gave me water, yet it was not the water alone that saved me. It was the strength of the hands that gave it.
But the death of a great mage, who has many times in his life walked on the dry steep hillsides of death’s kingdom, is a strange matter: for the dying man goes not blindly, but surely, knowing the way.
I forgot, being too interested myself, that he’s a king, and does not see things rationally, but as a king. All I’ve told him means to him simply that his power is threatened, his kingdom is a dust mote in space, his kingship is a joke to men who rule a hundred worlds.
To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world.
I didn’t know you well at all. Only, when you spoke, I seemed to see clear into you, into the center.
All her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars.
Because she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and ends was, to her too, false. For her as for him, there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration.
The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.
But I’m not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, ‘O lovely!
Take care, Tenar,” he said.
The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe.
All that grieved me – that I was half one thing and half another and nothing wholly – was the sorrow of my childhood, but the strength and use of my life after I grew up.