The Lathe of Heaven

by Ursula K. Le Guin

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

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? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper’s wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes

a machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal.