Powers (Annals of the Western Shore, #3)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

What’s freedom itself but the power of the mind to learn what it needs and think what it likes?

Freedom was unspeakable anguish.

I had believed that justice could exist in a society founded on injustice.

Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.

Women used and did what there was to use and do, but men shunned and despised a great many things, such as wicker chairs and cooking and storytelling, depriving themselves of many skills and pleasures, in order to prove that they weren’t women. Wouldn’t it be better to prove it by doing, rather than by not doing.