The trouble is, women have to be absolutely first class to get where third-class men get.
He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.
Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. – Chuang Tse: XXIII.
To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side.
Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it’s then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.
There’s another option. You can consider the reader, not as a helpless victim or a passive consumer, but as an active, intelligent, worthy collaborator. A colluder, a coillusionist.
The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.
There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom.
Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind’s reach and made a whole again. He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, waisted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it.
The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.
Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.
Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number – Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don’t look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysis, every now and then.
The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma.
He was very weary; the day had been long, and full of dragons.
It appears that we’ve given up on the long-range view. That we’ve decided not to think about consequences – about cause and effect. Maybe that’s why I feel that I live in exile. I used to live in a country that had a future.
Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it’s a manageable size, it’s comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever.
A decision worthy of the name is based on observation, factual information, intellectual and ethical judgment. Opinion – that darling of the press, the politician, and the poll – may be based on no information at all.
Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.
I am tired of safe places, and roofs, and walls around me.
I don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn’t a matter of faith, but of evidence.