Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.
The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.
We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report.
If we hide, Therru, we feed him. We will eat. And we will starve him. Come with me.
Boris Pasternak said that poetry makes itself from the relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words.
An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered all in one moment with its roots in his loins and its flowers in his mind.
Had his fear, in fact, been the personal fear that Selver might having learnt the racial hatred, reject him and treat him not as you but as one of them.
I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?
They made love. Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other’s arms, holding love, asleep.
It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.
Ethical counsel from the Under White Mountain people, far down the eastern coast of the Inland Sea, was not very well received. They advised: ‘Do not fight these sick people, cure them with human behavior,’ to which Rekwit responded tersely, ‘You come up north here and do that.
You can’t change anything from the outside in. Standing apart, looking down, talking the overview, you see pattern. What’s wrong, what’s missing. You want to fix it. But you can’t patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving.
I could forget everything I’d lost, because I’d never had it.
Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.
It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.
Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird feeder.
They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned.
The admirable is inexplicable.
I felt the pressure of people all around me, all the time. People around me, people with me, people pressing on me, pressing me to be one of them, one of the people.