“When he looked at me with his clear, kind, candid eyes, he looked at me out of a tradition thirteen thousand years old: a way of thought and and way of life so old, so well established, so integral and coherent as to give a human being the unselfconsciousness, the authority, the completeness of a wild animal, a great strange creature who looks straight at you out of his eternal present....”
―
―
“You are rich. You own. We are poor. We lack. You have. We do not have. Everything is beautiful here, only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces. The men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels. There you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit, because our men and women are free possessing nothing. They are free. And you, the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail, each alone, solitary with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes, the wall, the wall.”
― The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
― The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
“If trained to nature from an early age, could a mind be freed from its vendetta against the world's creatures?”
― Unsheltered
― Unsheltered
“Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in snide triumphant: ‘So get used to it!’
What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child’s budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ and her response will be: ‘Then make it fair!”
―
What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child’s budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ and her response will be: ‘Then make it fair!”
―
“The whole big, complicated world was simple and graspable and easy to unlock. I would stay here for the rest of time in the ocean which was the universe which was the soul which was all that mattered. I would stay here forever.”
― The Ocean at the End of the Lane
― The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Arin’s 2025 Year in Books
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