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“I believe you,” said the stranger, the alien alone with me, and so strong had my access of self-alienation been that I looked up at him bewildered.
talented brilliant incredible amazing showstopping spectacular
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Chen
Well, it may be the fact, but it’s a disgusting idea, Mr. Ai,
she wrote this in the 60s!
They behaved like animals, in that respect; or like women.
this is a fundamental belief that underlies the logic of binary gender and it's kind of beautiful that UKLG just had her narrator articulate it so simply but subconsciously
“To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
“tied down to childbearing,” implies that no one is quite so thoroughly “tied down” here as women,
the simone de beauvoir jumped out
Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else.
Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.
“human pronoun”
it is less defined, less specific, than the neuter or the feminine.
The king was pregnant.
“I didn’t expect to see you here, Lord Estraven.” “The unexpected is what makes life possible,” he said.
I was about to demand that he be more specific, but he said, “Good-bye, Mr. Ai,” turned, and left. I stood benumbed. The man was like an electric shock—nothing to hold on to and you don’t know what hit you.
“You don’t trust him either, eh?” “No, I don’t.”
MORON
Through him speaks a shrewd and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom a profound, old, terrible, and unimaginably various experience of life. But he himself is young: impatient, inexperienced. He stands higher than we stand, seeing wider, but he is himself only the height of a man.
For this useless sneaking life I threw away my power, my money, and my friends. What a fool you are, Therem. Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?
A great delight it was to feel that certainty again, to know that I could steer my fortune and the world’s chance like a bobsled down the steep, dangerous hour.
“I don’t mean to be unjust, Estraven—” “Yet you are. It is strange. I am the only man in all Gethen that has trusted you entirely, and I am the only man in Gethen that you have refused to trust.”
i'm honestly gonna cry
“How did you get all this?” “Stole it,” said the one-time prime minister of Karhide,
“What for?” “Curiosity, adventure.” He hesitated and smiled slightly. “The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life,” he said, quoting one of my Ekumenical quotations. “Ah, you were consciously extending the evolutionary tendency inherent in Being; one manifestation of which is exploration.” We were both well pleased with ourselves, sitting in the warm tent, drinking hot tea and waiting for the kadik-germ porridge to boil.
How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
“I’m glad I have lived to see this,” he said. I felt as he did. It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
I shall be glad to get off this slit and wrinkled ice-arm between two growling monsters. Mountains should be seen, not heard.
He looked ready to cry, but did not. I believe he considers crying either evil or shameful. 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? Yet his name is a cry of pain.
After all he is no more an oddity, a sexual freak, than I am; up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society and its rules, as he from his.
And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was.
It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness . . . how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.”
