As soon as I came there, I knew I could sleep. I felt as if I’d been asleep all along, in an evil dream, and now, here, I was truly awake: so I could truly sleep. There was a place he took me to, in among the roots of a huge tree, all soft with the fallen leaves of the tree, and he told me I could lie there. And i did, and I slept. I cannot tell you the sweetness of it.
To look at oneself and find it hideous, what a job! But then, when she hadn’t been hideous, had she sat around and stared at herself like this? Not much! A proper body’s not an object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it’s just you, yourself. Only when it’s no longer you, but yours, a thing owned, do you worry about it – Is it in good shape? Will it do? Will it last?
If by patriotism you don’t mean the love of one’s homeland, for that I do know.” “No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year. We’ve followed our road too far.
To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.
Somewhere inside us, I think, we all carry the Mowgli dream – that the other animals will see and accept us as one among them.
The scale is wrong. What can a single human brain achieve against something so vast?” “A single human brain can perceive pattern on the scale of stars and galaxies,” Tomiko said, “and interpret it as Love.
Where my love is going There will I go. Where his boat is rowing I will row. We will laugh together, Together we will cry. If he lives I will live, If he dies I die. Where my love is going There will I go. Where his boat is rowing I will row.
Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness.
What then are the uses of the imagination? – The use of it is to give you pleasure and delight.
Women were likely, as women, to take the next generation’s part, not this one’s; they wove the links men saw as chains, the bonds men saw as bondage.
But where’s democratic government got to? People can’t choose anything at all anymore for themselves. Why is everything so shoddy, why is everybody so joyless? You can’t even tell people apart – and the younger they are the more that’s so. This business of World State bringing up all the children in those Centers –.
The sun was hot but the ceaseless wind cooled the sweat on her face and arms. She leaned back on her hands and thought of nothing, sun and wind and sky and sea filling her, making her transparent to sun, wind, sky, sea. But her left hand reminded her of its existence.
Gethenians could make their vehicles go faster, but they do not. If asked why not, they answer “Why?” Like asking Terrans why all our vehicles must go so fast; we answer “Why not?” No disputing tastes. Terrans tend to feel they’ve got to get ahead, make progress. The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence.
If the yumens are men, they are men unfit or untaught to dream and to act as men.
I know that there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.
All fundamentalisms set strict limits to the uses of imagination, outside which the fundamentalist’s imagination itself runs riot.
No harmony endures,” said the young king. “None has ever been achieved,” said the Plenipotentiary. “The pleasure is in trying.
Primitive races always have to give way to civilized ones. Or be assimilated.
Why had he lived so long among those who were not kind?
The fine rain, falling unseen in darkness, pattered on the leaves overhead, on his arms and neck and head protected by their thick silk-fine hair, on the earth and ferns and undergrowth nearby, on all the leaves of the forest, near and far. Selver sat as quiet as the gray owl on a branch above him, unsleeping, his eyes wide open in the rainy dark.