Karthik Shetty

“I don’t mean to be unjust, Estraven-“

“Yet you are. It is strange. I am the only man in all Gethen that has trusted you entirely, and I am the only man in Gethen that you have refused to trust.”

He put his head in his hands. He said at last, “I’m sorry, Estraven.” It was both apology and admission.

“The fact is,” I said, “that you’re unable, or unwilling, to believe in the fact that I believe in you.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Not, perhaps, so elegant as your Berkeley Square, but sometimes, even here, you can hear a Nightingale sing.”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Devil's Alternative

“What does it mean to be a self? I think, more than anything else, it means the ability to select between different possible outcomes in order to direct oneself toward a desired outcome: to be future-oriented. When every day is the same, when we are not presented with the necessity to choose between different possibilities, we say we don’t “feel alive”—and here I think we guess at what being alive actually is. It is the ability to choose. We live in choices.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“I am no bird, no net ensnares me.”
― Charlotte Brontë