The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

He had been seen out on the fields pointing an instrument at the Sun, a device, they said, for measuring distances. He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.

She learned that single-sexed people, whom she tried hard not to think of as perverts, tried hard not to think of her as a pervert.

It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There’s the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.

a profound self-distrust manifesting itself as destructivism.

Had we but world enough and time . . .

The popular notion of science fiction, I guess, is of a story that takes some possible or impossible technological gimmick-of-the-future—Soylent Green, the time machine, the submarine—and makes hay out of it. There certainly are science fiction stories which do just that, but to define science fiction by them is a bit like defining the United States as Kansas.

There’d be no silver up there in the sun if there wasn’t trust between us down here in the dark.

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.

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.

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