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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

I came to long for snow, for blizzard, for anything: but morning after morning we came out of the tent into the void, the white weather, what Estraven called the Unshadow.

“It’s well known that honorable men come to be outlawed, yet their shadow does not shrink,”

I had not had in mind when I spoke the contemptibility of suicide to these people. It is not to them, as to us, an option. It is the abdication from option, the act of betrayal itself. 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.