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Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens.
We all have forests in our minds.
Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest,...
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The Hainish, like tiresomely understanding parents, supported their explorations,
Mr. Osden, being an empath, feels it. Feels his feelings, and yours, and is hard put to say which is which.
His hair was pale rust, like long-dried blood.
colors had cancelled out in Osden’s eyes, leaving a cold water-like clarity, infinitely penetrable.
He never looked directly at one. His face lacked expression, like an anatomical drawing, or a skinned face.
She had volunteered for this job because there was, in all probability, no use in doing it.
They were misfits among men, and what they saw there was not desolation, but peace.
they found no animals even among the microbiota. Nobody here ate anybody else.
Infinite silences.
flowerless forests where no foot had ever walked, no eye had ever looked. A warm, sad world, sad and serene.
wandering like picnickers over sunny plains of violet filicaliformes, spoke softly to each other. They knew their voices broke a silence of a thousand million years,
My choice is to be hated or to be despised. Not being a woman or a coward, I prefer to be hated.”
“Here’s his tent,” Tomiko said, cowed at the sound of her voice in that huge community of the voiceless.
The shifty gaze was hatefully familiar, but she was a physician, protective of the hurt.
he was quite relaxed, sinking towards sleep, like a man in pain who has been given relief from pain.
Given everything, all protection and love, by one man. Father/Mother/God: no other.
they must make do with sympathy, with pity, the small change of love.
“A single human brain can perceive pattern on the scale of stars and galaxies,” Tomiko said, “and interpret it as Love.”
He had taken the fear into himself, and, accepting, had transcended it.
At the little tearing-away pain, she whimpered; though it was a small pain it frightened her.
Shadows were beginning to pull themselves out again from under the rocks and shrubs.
They made way for him respectfully. He moved very quietly, respectful of them also.
When he blinked, it was like the passing of a hand before a candle-flame.
Her fine, hard face had gone serious, rather formidable. She glanced directly, as she seldom did, at the child, a brief gold sharpness.
The child gazed at him, in love already, forever.
The words tasted like iron, like salt in her mouth.
so where her fingers ended and the dirt began she did not know, as if she were dead, but she was wholly alive, she was the earth’s life.
“I didn’t cry,” the child said. “None of us do,” said Chickadee.
“Serves him right. Serves them all right,” the child said. She put her hands up over her face and began to cry terribly, without tears.
It increased, increased, increased, it was hard and thick, thick as hair, as wheat, no air between the lines of driving rain.
And then it began to end. It quieted. A spatter of raindrops, then none.
Five houses on the sagebrush plain. I never will be warm again, I think.
DEAD IS A HOLE. DEAD is a square black hole.
This is not why I was born! I was born because he stands a little to the left of the desk, his dark head bowed, his hands in the light of the lamp holding the register; and looks up; and sees me. I was born so that he might see me, he was born so that I might see him.
He for me and I for him, for this, for this we have come into the daylight and the starlight, the sea and the dry land.
What is it I fear for my girl? I fear even to say that: “my girl.” Too much at stake.
That’s what I fear for her, maybe. That she’ll be thrown away, like Jack. That she won’t amount to anything, won’t come to be who she is. What woman ever did? Not many.
WHAT OH WHAT OH NOW oh now that’s blood, there’s blood. I am bleeding. I am blood, blood. I am dead. Oh let me be in the black dark underground, under the roots of the trees. Go away, go away, he He took me in his car so far, his father’s car in the dark so far away from the party, far away, go away. Go away now so I can hide the blood.
“You want me to believe you when you lie,” she said, as if asking his confirmation of the statement.
Her voice, growing shrill, broke on the last word, and she gave a sharp cry, as if she had cut herself.
He whispered her name and put up his hand to touch hers, tentative, as one might reach to touch a wound.
Before either had crossed a street the husband and wife were lost to each other’s sight.
When the great kelp trees of the sea-floor forests are battered by deep waves in storms, broken fronds and stems churn and disintegrate into a froth, whipped by wave and wind into lasting foam, that rides the combers and is thrown ashore by the breakers. And so it is not salt-white, but oxidizes to dun or yellowish as the living cells decay. It’s death that colors it. If it were pure foam of water the bubbles would last no longer than the bursting bubbles of a freshwater creek. But this is water of the sea, brewed, imbued, souped up with life and life’s dying and decaying.
It is tainted, it is profoundly impure. It is the mother-fluid, the amniotic minestrone.
From the unmotherly sea of winter, the cold drowner, the wrecker, from her lips flies the mad foam. And on the lips, on the tongue, it does not taste pure and salt, but bursts like coarse champagne with an insipid, earthy fla...
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But his face changes. He sees her. His eyes grow intent. What happened to you? he asks. A dry well with a broken rope.
she thought he loved her, she thought she belonged to him. I know, I know.
