Malafrena Quotes

“...ama kalbi sen benim evimsin, yuvamsın, yolculuğum ve vardığım yersin, çabam ve çabaladıktan sonra uykumsun diyordu.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“İtiraz etme, karşı koyma alışkanlığı güçlüydü, kök salmıştı, ama şimdi, daha eski bir alışkanlığa, sessizliğe dönme zamanıydı.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“Keşke papaz biraz daha kalmış olsaydı. Daha iyi bir ölüm hiç görmedim."
"Evet," dedi İtale. "Nasıl yapılacağını en iyi bildiği şeylerden biriydi bu.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“Adaletsizliğin kanun adı altında kurumsallaşabileceğini, gaddarlığın silahlı adamlar ve kilitli kapılar kılığında kendini var edip sürdürebileceğini biliyordu ama buna inanmıyordu; şimdiye kadar inanmamıştı.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“O sanki yenilgiye âşık biri.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“Uzun süre söylenmeden kalan yasaklanmış her kelime, içinde sessizliğin gücünü biriktirir.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“İnsanın kendi başına, kendisi için yaptığı dışında özgürlük yoktur.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“İnsan mutlaka gelmesi gereken birtakım yerlere gelir, karşılaşması gereken birtakım insanlarla karşılaşır kimi zaman. Onların farkına varmamak, dönüp onlardan uzaklaşmak insanın kaderini ıskalaması demektir.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“Eserlerini yasaklayan şey korku, ama bu yasağı kabul eden şey de miskinlik. Senin için bir görev olan özgürlükte ısrarcı olman gerekir.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“You have to keep it,” he said with intensity. “I didn’t know why I left till I came back—I have to come back to find that I have to go again. I haven’t even begun the new life yet. I am always beginning it. I will die beginning it. Will you keep it for me, Piera?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“I should like to be your friend.” “You are,” he said almost inaudibly; but his heart said, you are my house, my home; the journey and the journey’s end; my care, and sleep after care.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“He thought of the moment last night, the earliest and most terrible memory roused when his father had said, “You’re here too, Itale?” But it was no longer terrible. “I’m here,” he said into the wind.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“He saw what Laura had meant. He saw why she had been able to say to him, “You are my freedom,” knowing what he had not known, that she was his freedom; that you cannot leave home unless there is a home to leave. Who builds the house, and for whom is it built, for whom kept?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“They were there, around him, his own people, but he was not one of them. They were at home, all of them but him. What have I done? he thought. Why have I no home?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“It was easy to floor Itale, he was never on guard; but it was not easy to touch, or hold, or change him.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“Emanuel was watching the two of them, profiled against the fire. Itale looked floored. Evidently Piera had got tired of being overlooked. She would know how to make herself felt, once she put her mind to it; she had become formidable in her competence.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“His mother watched him, and said nothing. So she had watched Guide for thirty years. Often at her housework or at night, lying awake in autumn darkness, she thought of the merry child, the awkward, gallant boy, and the man she had seen him—barely seen him—becoming. It had not been this man; this somber, restless, silent man, this second Guide—yet not like Guide as she had first known him, for Guide as a young man had rejoiced in his work, and had suffered no defeat. In Eleonora’s heart those October nights was the same bitter resentment against the world that offers so vast a chance to the young spirit and, when it comes to the point, gives so narrow a lot; the same scorn and resentment that her daughter had felt, that Piera had felt, and that she recognised in them, but with little hope for them and none for herself.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“Itale was up at four, at the vineyards and the winery all day till dark. He saw nothing at all in the world beyond the vines, the grapes, the boxes, baskets, carts and wagons loaded with the grapes, the pressing tubs in a stone courtyard stained and reeking with must, the brief dark coolness of the storage cellars dug into the hillside, the swing of the sun across the hot September sky. Then that work was done; and other harvests from the fields and orchards were coming in. Silent and absorbed, irascible when pushed past the limit of his strength, otherwise patient, Itale got on with the work and never raised his eyes from it to look back or ahead.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“He felt a little empty, lightened; the way a woman might feel after childbirth, he thought: light, quiet, tired. A queer thing to be comparing himself to a woman, and a woman after childbirth. But there was Eleonora’s face, the morning of Itale’s birth: her smile then, the center of his life. Nothing of his own.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“I am trying to make you see that no matter what the stupid police say you are a free man,” she said, fierce. “Am I not allowed to work for freedom? You are my freedom, Itale.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“But you must not trust me, Laura!” he said desperately, all pretense of irony abandoned. “When I used to talk about freedom, I didn’t know what prison was. I talked about the good but I—I didn’t know evil— I am responsible for all the evil I saw, for the— For the deaths— There is nothing I can do about it. All I can do is be silent, not to say what I’m saying now. Let me be silent, I don’t want to do more harm!” “Life’s the harm,” Laura said quietly, drily.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“Because there is nothing left of that life. It’s finished—gone, scattered. Overnight. There never was anything to it.” She walked on beside him. “Dreams of youth,” he said. “All that has given my life any meaning for five years has been my belief that you were free—that you were working for freedom, doing what I couldn’t do, for me—even when you were in jail—then most of all, Itale!”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“This time he had as badly misunderstood Itale, when all the young man was doing was clinging desperately to the last fragments of pride. It was always pride with these two; their strength and patience, their violence and vulnerability, all came down to pride, to the resistance of the will to the insults and indifference of time. Resistance, never acceptance. They gave with open hands, but they had never learned to receive. Guide’s somber temper had turned ardent in the son, but the root of it still was pride and pain. The world is a hard place for the strong, Emanuel thought; it gives no quarter; no man ever defied evil and got off lightly.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“The relation between Guide and Itale, the bond of absolute loyalty strained impossibly by competitive pride, the understanding and hostility, the vulnerability of each to the other, all that was beyond Emanuel now as always. Whenever he came close to that passionate and essential relationship in either the son or the father he burned his fingers in the fire of it, fumbled, lost his temper, guessed wrong.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“I was a fool before I—before that. Now I’m wise, now I know what a fool I was, right? But what use is wisdom, what good is it, when the price of it is hope?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“Here I come to ground, he thought. I thought I must succeed, because my hopes were so high, and I have failed. I thought I must win, because my cause was just, and I have been defeated. It was all air, words, talk, lies: and the steel chain that brings you up short two steps from the wall. For five years he had been sick for home, and now, forced to it as a fugitive, he must come to it knowing that he had no home.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“Itale remembered how, years ago now, he had pulled out his watch to check the hour that he first lost sight of those mountains; nine-twenty of a September morning it had been, he recalled the hour though not the date. He had been on his way to Solariy. And from Solariy, in time, to Krasnoy. And to Aisnar, and to Esten, and to Rákava; to the dark cold room where he had been chained to the wall; to Roukh Square at dawn, and Ebroiy Street in the smoky evening. And now he was come round full circle and even so did not know where he was going, or where was any place he could with a clear heart call home.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“They stood up, stretching, and balanced on the crown of the barricade between the fortress and the risen sun. With the act of standing up the simplification, the clarification of thought and feeling was perfected. Itale was completely happy, standing there empty-handed beside his friend in the indifferent calm of the morning. He had nothing left in the world but the day’s light, no weapon, no shelter, no future. It was for this he had lived and waited. Almost tenderly he thought of the soldiers sweating inside their stone walls there; what was there to worry about? It was the break of day, and standing up there he could have crowed like a cock at daybreak, in pure joy, in celebration of the light.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“I’m not the person who is to be married in Aisnar in March. And that can’t be! If I’m to marry I must marry with all my heart. Anything less would be wrong, a lie, an unforgivable lie.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“No one had ever spoken to her about what freedom is for a woman, what it might consist of and how it is to be won. Or not won, that seemed the wrong word for a woman’s freedom; worked at, perhaps.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena