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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation.

Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.

“No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.

“Cured?” Goss said. “Would you cure a singer of his voice?”

“Yes. I see that…. Well, I thank you, Genry. But my business is unlearning, not learning. And I’d rather not yet learn an art that would change the world entirely.” “By your own foretelling this world will change, and within five years.” “And I’ll change with it, Genry. But I have no wish to change it.”

“To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”

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

The king was pregnant.

It seemed to me as I listened to Tibe’s dull fierce speeches that what he sought to do by fear and by persuasion was to force his people to change a choice they had made before their history began, the choice between those opposites.

But the Ekumen is not essentially a government at all. It is an attempt to reunify the mystical with the political, and as such is of course mostly a failure; but its failure has done more good for humanity so far than the successes of its predecessors.

Now if the Ekumen, as an experiment in the superorganic, does eventually fail, it will have to become a peace-keeping force, develop a police, and so on. But at this point there’s no need. All the central worlds are still recovering from a disastrous era a couple of centuries ago, reviving lost skills and lost ideas, learning how to talk again….”

An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.

There were vivid personalities among them—Obsle, Slose, the handsome and detestable Gaum—and yet each of them lacked some quality, some dimension of being; and they failed to convince. They were not quite solid.

It was, I thought, as if they did not cast shadows.

He is infinitely a stranger, and I a fool, to let my shadow cross the light of the hope he brings us.

To oppose something is to maintain it.

To become a high officer in the Sarf one must have, it seems, a certain complex form of stupidity.

He stands higher than we stand, seeing wider, but he is himself only the height of a man.

It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have.

They tended to be stolid, slovenly, heavy, and to my eyes effeminate—not in the sense of delicacy, etc., but in just the opposite sense: a gross, bland fleshiness, a bovinity without point or edge.

But it is not human to be without shame and without desire.

the gift is perhaps not strictly or simply one of foretelling, but is rather the power of seeing (if only for a flash) everything at once: seeing whole.

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