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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Lathe of Heaven has the feel of a fable, part fairy tale, part philosophical and psychological exploration of questions central to much of Le Guin’s work: What are the consequences of working for change, even with the best of intentions? What is the cost of utopia? What is the use and meaning of dreams?
Of course, the difference between a magician and a writer is that when the writer leaves the stage the story remains. The magic persists.
Orr had a tendency to assume that people knew what they were doing, perhaps because he generally assumed that he did not.
To cross a river, ford it, wade it, swim it, use boat, ferry, bridge, airplane, to go upriver, to go downriver in the ceaseless renewal and beginning of current: all that makes sense. But in going under a river, something is involved that is, in the central meaning of the word, perverse. There are roads in the mind and outside it the mere elaborateness of which shows plainly that, to have got into this, a wrong turning must have been taken way back.
Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.
and so now she’d have heartburn. On top of pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul.
A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole; such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.
Those who dream of feasting wake to lamentation. —CHUANG TSE: II
“Well, you’re a queer fish, George, and the queerest thing about you is that there’s nothing queer about you!”
I walk on the ground and the ground’s walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world.
There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
