The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Life loves to know itself, out to its furthest limits; to embrace complexity is its delight. Our difference is our beauty.

You stand behind the glass wall of your sanity like one at an airport watching a crash.

Some, born gamblers, will always choose to live on the side of a volcano.

We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”

I have learned to see God. All I have to do is open my eyes, and I see the Face of God. And I’d give all my life just to see one human face again, to see a tree, just a tree, a chair—a plain wooden chair, ordinary—They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!”

I had no choice, and therefore have no regret.

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

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.

To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it.

A proper body’s not an object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it’s just you, yourself.

But what could one do but go on? Had one any real choice, ever? To die was merely to go on in another direction.

After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory. A real sense of triumph must be preceded by real despair. She had unlearned despair a long time ago. There were no more triumphs. One went on.

“What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.”