Matthew Bizer’s Reviews > The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia > Status Update

"…And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death." […] “I'll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"

“They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. But I will not believe that. I want the walls down. I want solidarity, human solidarity.”

“In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way round: the university conferred superiority on the man. They told Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships […] was stiffer every year, proving the essential democracy of the institution. He said, ‘You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.’”

“It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.”

“If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, […] it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern.”