The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle)
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
Ursula K. Le Guin • The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle)
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. He got up and scribbled down, without really waking, the mathematical formula that had been eluding him for days. He saw space shrink in upon him like the walls of a collapsing sphere drivi
... See moreUrsula K. Le Guin • The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle)
This is a bit like what Charlie Munger would call a “latticework of mental models,” at the exact moment where clear connections are being made.
“I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made two hundred years ago in this city—the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single pr
... See moreUrsula K. Le Guin • The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle)
People with nothing can recognize capital’s human depreciation much more than the people fortunate enough to have nice things.
Indeed the longer he lived on Urras, the less real it became to him. It seemed to be slipping out of his grasp—all that vital, magnificent, inexhaustible world which he had seen from the windows of his room, his first day on the world. It slipped out of his awkward, foreign hands, eluded him, and when he looked again he was holding something
Ursula K. Le Guin • The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle)
“You admit no religion outside the churches, just as you admit no morality outside the laws. You know, I had not ever understood that, in all my reading of Urrasti books.”
Ursula K. Le Guin • The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle)
The delicate concentric mobiles hanging at different levels overhead moved with the introverted precision, silence, mystery of the organs of the body or the processes of the reasoning mind. Shevek would sit down at the table under the windows and begin to work, reading or making notes or calculating. Gradually the sunlight entered, shifted across t
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Lovely image. I wonder if this mobile will serve the development of Shivek's simultuneity theory?
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,
... See moreUrsula K. Le Guin • The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle)
If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.
Ursula K. Le Guin • The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle)
“Engineers are themselves proof of the existence of causal reversibility. You see Reumere has his effect built before I have provided the cause.”