Five Ways to Forgiveness (Hainish Cycle, #7)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

By now Havzhiva knew that everything he had learned in Stse, all the knowledge he had had, could be labeled: typical pueblo culture of northwestern coastal South Continent. He knew that the beliefs, practices, kinship systems, technologies, and intellectual organising patterns of the different pueblos were entirely different one from another, wildly different, totally bizarre—just as bizarre as the system of Stse—and he knew that such systems were to be met with on every Known World that contained human populations living in small, stable groups with a technology adapted to their environment, a low, constant birth rate, and a political life based on consent.

In general the men were gradualists, the women ready for revolution.

“Literacy is irrelevant,” one of our group said sorrowfully. “The chiefs have jumped right over our heads into the postliterate information technology.”

What is one man’s and one woman’s love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery.