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Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
There were walls around all his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of them, though he was perpetually hiding behind them.
“I never thought before,” said Tirin unruffled, “of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, ‘Look, there’s the Moon.’ Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth.” “Where, then, is Truth?” declaimed Bedap, and yawned. “In the hill one happens to be sitting on,” said Tirin.
But why hate? Hate’s not functional; why are we taught it?
“What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You’re denying brotherhood, Shevek!” the tall girl cried. “No—no, I’m not. I’m trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins—it begins in shared pain.”
His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.
Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.”
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
“It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed.”
“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage
point of death.”
“There’s a point, around age twenty,” Bedap said, “when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
