Em > Em's Quotes

“I'd three times sooner go to war than suffer childbirth once.”
― Euripides, Medea

“Love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.”
― Plato, The Symposium

“Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”
― Plato, The Symposium

“what if the man could see Beauty Itself, pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality, and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine,...the man becoming in that communion, the friend of God, himself immortal;...would that be a life to disregard?”
― Plato, The Symposium

“Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.”
― Kait Rokowski

“...each living creature is said to be alive and to be the same individual-- as for example someone is said to be the same person from when he is a child until he comes to be an old man. And yet, if he's called the same, that's despite the fact that he's never made up from the same things, but is always being renewed, and losing what he had before, whether it's hair, or flesh, or bones, or blood, in fact the whole body. And don't suppose that this is just true in the case of the body; in the case of the soul, too, its traits, habits, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears-- none of these things is ever the same in any individual, but some are coming into existence, others passing away.”
― Plato, The Symposium

“I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.”
― Leonardo Da Vinci

“Fear breeds a desire for simplicity. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Chains of command.”
― Solas

“Faith is like a pickpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“He thought of death, in that gap between the beginning of a step and its completion, and at the end of the step he stood on a new earth.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“I'm afraid of life! There are times I--I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn't all a misunderstanding-- this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain... If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could... get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“You shall not go down good twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You CAN go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“There is no break in the wholeness of time.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Power inheres in a center. You're going to the center.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“He saw time turn back upon itself, a river flowing upward to the spring. He held the contemporaneity of two moments in his left and right hands; as he moved them apart he smiled to see the moments separate like dividing soap bubbles.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“They preserved autonomy of conscience even at the cost of becoming eccentric.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“I didn't know you well at all. Only, when you spoke, I seemed to see clear into you, into the center.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“The usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears them out, discards them, gets a new model.”
― Ursula K. Le Guinla

“All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Well, we think that time 'passes,' flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“We came, Takver thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that's already between us, the distance of our sex, the differences of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, he comes back....”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“The strength of Shevek's personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“That was unthinkable, he said; all men believe in God, even those who reject Him. Of this he was absolutely sure; if ever he came to doubt it, his life would lose all meaning.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“How did I picture the life after the grave?

I Fairly bawled out at him: 'A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger