The Lathe of Heaven

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Orr had a tendency to assume that people knew what they were doing, perhaps because he generally assumed that he did not.

Anyway, so what if he was crazy? What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate? she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it?

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.

There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.