Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand Of Darkness Quotes
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate.
I was alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark palace, in a strange snow-changed city, in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world.
... there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
Cinders patter, falling with the snow. We creep infinitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself. Praise then Creation unfinished!
Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it.
A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government in earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
I think we shall have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round and round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.
It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.
Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?'...'Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels.
Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord.""It might to keep it open.