Caution: No Semblance Of Order

Mars. 30s. Take a hard hat, mind your step. Consistency is the false god of ego.

[pigeonpraxis]

They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned. They were intelligent, their minds were already disciplined to the clarity of science, and they were sixteen years old.

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 42)

[pigeonpraxis]

"I never thought before," said Tirin unruffled, "of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Antares, at us, and saying, 'Look, there's the Moon.' Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth." "Where, then, is Truth?" declaimed Bedap, and yawned. "In the hill one happens to be sitting on," said Tirin.

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 39)

[pigeonpraxis]

"It is not yours," the one-eyed woman said with the mildness of utter certainty. "Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it."

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 26)

[pigeonpraxis]

"That was a horse. Donkeys don't come that size." They wanted to talk with him, but Shevek was not listening again. He was thinking of Takver. He wondered what that deep, dry, dark gaze out of the darkness would have meant to Takver. She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary. Takver would have known how to look back at that eye in the darkness under the trees."

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 21)

[pigeonpraxis]

"Kimoe's ideas never seemed to be able to go in a straight line; they had to walk around this and avoid that, and then they ended up smack against a wall. There were walls around all his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of them, though he was perpetually hiding behind them."

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 15)

[thethirdromana]

Putting the term "Catholic guilt" on a high shelf where fandom can't reach it until everyone learns how to identify characters who are very very clearly coded as Protestant.

[queer-crows-nightmare]

[smokefalls]

What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain—you said that! But it’s the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy. It’s the lies that make you want to kill yourself.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

[ashadowonsnow]

They talked, and new worlds were born of their talking.

The Dispossessed, U. K. Le Guin

[smokefalls]

“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

[smokefalls]

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

[oparhelion]

He had always feared that this would happen, more than he had ever feared death. 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

[void-ptr]

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.

— Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed

[smokefalls]

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.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

[litsnaps]

[les-rallizes]

Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the love of nature" seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. 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. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

[pulchrasilva]

Ursula k le guin will literally see a dichotomy and say "anyone gonna write a novel set on the point where that line gets blurry" and not even wait for an answer

[the-art-archive]

Night at the Rodos island (1850) by Ivan Aivazovsky