The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

What heroism he possesses is about surviving failure and failing better.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it.

when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.

They are not excluded from society, but they are tolerated with some disdain, as homosexuals are in many bisexual societies.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

This may be slander.).

One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.

His speeches were long and loud: praises of Karhide, disparagements of Orgoreyn, vilifications of “disloyal factions,” discussions of the “integrity of the Kingdom’s borders,” lectures in history and ethics and economics, all in a ranting, canting, emotional tone that went shrill with vituperation or adulation.

Now Karhide was to pull herself together and do the same; and the way to make her do it was not by sparking her pride, or building up her trade, or improving her roads, farms, colleges, and so on; none of that; that’s all civilization, veneer, and Tibe dismissed it with scorn.

It was warm to start with, and an exploitive civilization wrecked its natural balances fifty or sixty thousand years ago, burned up the forests for kindling, as it were.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose.

They were without shame and without desire, like the angels. But it is not human to be without shame and without desire.

“A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.”

He was frank, and expected a reciprocal frankness that I might not be able to supply. He, after all, had no standards of manliness, of virility, to complicate his pride.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

The Snow of Ignorance remains untrodden.

Even when he was very ill and weak, the first days of our escape, he hid his face from me when he wept. Reasons personal, racial, social, sexual—how can I guess why Ai must not weep?

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.

I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one’s life, is whether one’s born male or female. In most societies it determines one’s expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners—almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food.

What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.

His loyalty extended without disproportion to things, the patient, obstinate, reliable things that we use and get used to, the things we live by. He missed the sledge.

It was a little like being inside the tent up on the Ice, but without shelter, without food, without rest: nothing left but our companionship, and that soon to end.

But I had not the strength, the courage, to get off my bed and shut my prison door.

To a Karhider reading our canons, the crime of Judas lies not in his betrayal of Christ but in the act that, sealing despair, denies the chance of forgiveness, change, life: his suicide.

It had taken Estraven six months to arrange my first audience. It had taken the rest of his life to arrange this second one.