The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.

“No harmony endures,” said the young king. “None has ever been achieved,” said the Plenipotentiary. “The pleasure is in trying.”

Things you use; things you possess, and are possessed by; things you build with—bricks, words. You build houses with them, and towns, and causeways. But the buildings fall, the causeways cannot go all the way. There is an abyss, a gap, a last step to be taken.

Then she looked over at her sleeping baby, and out the open doorway into the darkness of late spring that lay warm in the streets where no one walked and the rooms where no one lived.

No, she said, the end will be the end. This is still just the waiting for it.

He knew Guennar was mad, but the size of his madness was a new thing to him, and admirable.

“Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?