The Lathe of Heaven

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do

in being a part one is whole; such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

But now, never to have known a woman with brown skin, brown skin and wiry black hair cut very short so that the elegant line of the skull showed like the curve of a bronze vase—no, that was wrong. That was intolerable. That every soul on earth should have a body the color of a battleship: no! That’s why she’s not here, he thought. She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people’s world. She had not been born.

The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”

Snakebite serum is not prescribed for all.

quiet as a thief in the night, a sense of well-being came into him, a certainty that things were all right, and that he was in the middle of things.

Self is universe. He would not be allowed to be isolated, to be stranded.

the whole world as it now is should be on my side, because I dreamed a lot of it up, too. Well, after all, it is on my side. That is, I’m a part of it. Not separate from it. I walk on the ground and the ground’s walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world.

You have to help another person. But it’s not right to play God with masses of people.

“Nobody can destroy me,” he said, and laughed a little, deep in his chest, almost a sob, “not so long as I have a little help from my friends.

In bed, they made love. Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other’s arms, holding love, asleep. In her sleep Heather heard the roaring of a creek full of the voices of unborn children singing.

A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully—as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously.

He stood and endured reality.