• Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Full Title: The Left Hand of Darkness
  • Tags: #Inbox #books

Highlights

  • Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life. (Location 132)
  • Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic. (Location 136)
  • As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep. (Location 716)
  • “You don’t see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?” “No—” “To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.” (Location 1068)
  • “The (Location 1075)
  • “The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. (Location 1078)
  • The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.” (Location 1080)
  • “How shall we deal with strangers, except as brothers? How shall Gethen treat with a union of eighty worlds, except as a world?” (Location 1272)
  • Lacking the Karhidish “human pronoun” used for persons in somer, I must say “he,” for the same reasons as we used the masculine pronoun in referring to a transcendent god: it is less defined, less specific, than the neuter or the feminine. (Location 1368)
  • To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road. (Location 2074)
  • I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy. (Location 3159)