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I began to imagine that it had already happened, that I had dozed off and missed it, and so—like life itself—I believed that what was about to happen had already taken place, was already over, and I allowed myself to forget it, only to be surprised by it moments later.

This is a world where what strikes us, at first, as ominous can grow to become commonplace, even reassuring. What seems, at first, reassuring can grow to become ominous, too.

The point is we are bound to roll downhill. What do you know that rolls up? What starts the downward progress is immaterial.

Every misunderstanding has at its center a breakdown of language.

Seniority is an institution that is revered and resented in and out of society.

Grief makes everything intimate

And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety—it stands alongside our sadness.

People are like that. (...) They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.

If we choose to give the child the intensity of individual love, we can’t spare her what comes with that, the risk of pain. Pain from us, and through us.

one occasionally sees a very old friend, with a vividness to which all the past contributes

The only security we have is our neighbors’ approval. An archist can break a law and hope to get away unpunished, but you can’t ‘break’ a custom; it’s the framework of your life with other people.

Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.’ We can’t stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.

The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution.

If we must all agree, all work together, we’re no better than a machine. If an individual can’t work in solidarity with his fellows, it’s his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We’ve been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the ride of the majority. But any rule is tyranny.

For we each of us deserve everything (...), and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the Virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.

She was calm. She was calm as a waterworn stone which, contemplated, calms.

So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the 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.

Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

For after all, (…) it was joy they were both after — the completeness of being. If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration.

revolution begins in the thinking mind.

the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate — we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice.

When a man feels himself alone against all the rest, he might well be frightened.

he listened as he might have listened to music or to running; water, without trying to reply.

Little children are stoical. They cry over bumps, but they take the big things as they come, they don’t whine like so many adults.

earth itself was uncertain, unreliable. The enduring, the reliable, is a promise made by the human mind.

It isn’t changing around from place to place that keeps you lively. It’s getting time on your side. Working with it, not against it.