Leisha Colyn

“...the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don't cooperate--we obey.

We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear ur neighbor's opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice.
...
We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We've made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can't see them, because they're part of our thinking.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“The fundamental unity of the Sequence and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe. How could he have stared at reality for ten years and not seen it? There would be no trouble at all in going on. Indeed he had already gone on. He was there. He saw all that was to come in this first, seemingly casual glimpse of the method, given him by his understanding of a failure in the distant past. The wall was down. The vision was both clear and whole. What he saw was simple, simpler than anything else. It was simplicity: and contained in it all complexity, all promise. It was revelation. It was the way clear, the way home, the light.

The spirit in him was like a child running out into the sunlight. There was no end, no end. ...

And yet in his utter ease and happiness he shook with fear; his hands trembled, and his eyes filled up with tears, as if he had been looking into the sun. After all, the flesh is not transparent. And it is strange, exceedingly strange, to know that one's life has been fulfilled. Yet he kept looking, and going farther, with that same childish joy, until all at once he could not go any farther; he came back, and looking around through his tears saw that the room was dark and the high windows were full of stars.

The moment was gone; he saw it going. He did not try to hold on to it. He knew he was part of it, not it of him. He was in its keeping.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“I thought the same thing, exactly. We always say that. you said it--you should have refused to go to Rolny. I said it as soon as I got to Elbow; I'm a free man. I didn't have to come here!...We always think it, and say it, but we don't do it. We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind, like a room where we can come and say, 'I don't have to do anything, I make my own choices, I'm free.' And then we leave the little room in our mind, and go where PDC posts us, and stay till we're reposted.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin