The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle)

“The work I’ve done for you,” Shevek said, “is part of the work I’ve done following Gvarab’s ideas in Simultaneity. If you want one, you’ll have to stand the other. Grain grows best in shit, as we say in Northsetting.” He stood a moment, and getting no verbal reply from Sabul, said goodbye and left. He knew he had won a battle, and easily, without

Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking min

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

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.

On days when he had no classes, when she came in he might have been sitting at the table for six or eight hours straight. When he got up he would lurch with fatigue, his hands would shake, and he was scarcely coherent. The usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears them out, discards them, gets a new model.

“Engineers are themselves proof of the existence of causal reversibility. You see Reumere has his effect built before I have provided the cause.”

To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.

tautological

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.