Lucas’s Reviews > The Dispossessed > Status Update

"For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead Kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward."

"Sometimes when she spoke of the strength of Urras, and the danger of bargaining with the strong from a position of weakness, he believed her."

"So, looking back on the last four years [apart], Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts."

"We came, she thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that's already between us, the distance of our sex, the difference of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look."

"Little children are stoical. They cry over bumps, but they take the big things as they come, they don't whine like so many adults."

"You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."

"To him a thinking man's job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect. It was not an easy job."

"The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognises no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself."