Ulla Gomez > Recent Status Updates

Strange to think that we could leave, just as we pleased, stepping on what had been ocean. Animals might come and go, and we could walk across the sea, but the ice led to vaster wilderness, and we were not strong enough to carry our supplies.

“We thought we had set aside great stores, but this winter was longer, colder, and darker than any we had known. We finished our salted meat and rationed our dried cod. As other creatures do in winter, we ate less and slept longer. The nights were so long that it seemed the whole world was asleep.”

I felt a new spirit of attentiveness to nature, no less wonderful for being entirely unoriginal, for as old as it is as a human experience, it was new to me. For many years, the seasons had largely passed me by, my perceptions of the steady cycle of nature disrupted by travel and urban life.

“Maybe the hare's dubious reputation, I thought, has less to do with the hare itself than our habit as humans of persecuting the things that we do not understand, and our own conflicted natures.”

“each day the leveret enchanted me with its even, gentle temper and unwavering sweetness of character”

Here we were. Were we not? If not, who spoke? Who heard?
percival "dash" collier

“To stay, one must deeply and continuously dwell upon one's primary reason for staying; even to the exclusion of all else.
roger bevins iii

One must be constantly looking for opportunities to tell one's story.
hans vollman”

“We can’t be good unless we know what bad is” p. 178

If you're sane enough to know that you're crazy then you're not as crazy as if you thought you were sane.

“The first thing I perceive is time. I sense it as a slow, cruel current of enormous mass passing constantly through my body to gradually overcome me.”

there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, 'Look, there's the Moon." Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth."

"You never leave the house?"
"Never, haven't for some years. At one point in my life, I made a few quite precise calculations: if I leave the house in search of the company of one intelligent person, one honest person, I run the risk of meeting en route a dozen thieves and half as many idiots who stand poised to communicate to me their views on mankind, the national government, the city administration...

“It takes so much to make you feel big in this world. It only takes an ocean to make you feel tiny”

“To live is to feel pain… and to live in fear of pain is to refuse to live”

"I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It's so loud that one can talk the whole time, without people hearing what one says."

“I don't play accurately-any one can play accurately-but I play with wonderful expression.”

Music ... creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears.

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moon-light, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

“She had asked him where he was living; that was a good sign, he had thought, not having yet learnt that in England such inquiries don't precede or hint at an invitation, but rather serve to determine social class; they are the equivalent of the American question 'What do you do?'”

“It was a lukewarm day in Leicester, drizzling, with a fitful sun that kept promising much and delivering nothing”

“It was a lukewarm day in Leicester, drizzling, with a fitful sun that kept promising much and delivering nothing”

..Yes, it comes back to me. I was waiting for a friend. Say, wait a minute, didn't we speak to one another?"
"We did!"
And then in the way that Cubans get really friendly, Arnaz and Cesar reinvented their pasts so that, in fact, they had probably been good friends.

“She had very fine eyes… full of soul”

“ Anything is grand, if it is done on a large enough scale”