The Dispossessed

This was the first book I read on a kindle.  It's one of those scifi books which that works like a lens to focus new light on your life.  The kindle is fun because it lets you save up all the parts you want to highlight and then export them as a text file.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 116-17 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2010, 10:22 AM

He had always feared that this would happen, more than he had ever feared death. To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 312-13 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2010, 10:59 AM

He thought of death, in that gap between the beginning of a step and its completion, and at the end of the step he stood on a new earth.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 557-58 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2010, 03:36 PM

They stood motionless, their faces without expression, in their role as guards. They were not playing the new role now, it was playing them.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 597-600 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2010, 04:22 PM

“I never thought before,” said Tirin unruffled, “of the fact that 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.” “Where, then, is Truth?” declaimed Bedap, and yawned. “In the hill one happens to be sitting on,” said Tirin.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 607-15 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2010, 04:26 PM

Three days ago in a class on the History of the Odonian Movement they had all seen the same visual lesson, and the image of iridescent jewels in the smooth hollow of women’s oiled, brown bellies had since recurred to all of them, privately. They had also seen the corpses of children, hairy like themselves, stacked up like scrap metal, stiff and rusty, on a beach, and men pouring oil over the children and lighting it. “A famine in Bachifoil Province in the Nation of Thu,” the commenter’s voice had said. “Bodies of children dead of starvation and disease are burned on the beaches. On the beaches of Tius, seven hundred kilometers away in the Nation of A-Io (and here came the jeweled navels), women kept for the sexual use of male members of the propertied class (the lotic words were used, as there was no equivalent for either word in Pravic) lie on the sand all day until dinner is served to them by people of the unpropertied class.” A close-up of dinnertime: soft mouths champing and smiling, smooth hands reaching out for delicacies wetly mounded in silver bowls. Then a switch back to the blind, blunt face of a dead child, mouth open, empty, black, dry. “Side by side,” the quiet voice had said.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1288-91 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 02:38 PM

He was alone, here, because he came from a self-exiled society. He had always been alone on his own world because he had exiled himself from his society. The Settlers had taken one step away. He had taken two. He stood by himself, because he had taken the metaphysical risk. And he had been fool enough to think that he might serve to bring together two worlds to which he did not belong.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1318-20 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 02:43 PM

And yet they always had a waiting list. However pragmatic the morality a young Anarresti absorbed, yet life overflowed in him, demanding altruism, self-sacrifice, scope for the absolute gesture. Loneliness, watchfulness, danger, spaceships: they offered the lure of romance.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1396-97 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 02:54 PM

“Excess is excrement,” Odo wrote in the Analogy. “Excrement retained in the body is a poison.”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1501-4 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 03:09 PM

Since he was very young he had known that in certain ways he was unlike anyone else he knew. For a child the consciousness of such difference is very painful, since, having done nothing yet and being incapable of doing anything, he cannot justify it. The reliable and affectionate presence of adults who are also, in their own way, different, is the only reassurance such a child can have; and Shevek had not had it.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1569-73 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 03:57 PM

Why had they stuck him in here? He soon found out why. It was the right kind of place for his kind of work. If ideas arrived at midnight, he could turn on the light and write them down; if they came at dawn, they weren’t jostled out of his head by the conversation and commotion of four or five roommates getting up; if they didn’t come at all and he had to spend whole days sitting at his desk staring out the window, there was nobody behind his back to wonder why he was slacking. Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1585-89 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 04:00 PM

The job was worth doing and he was doing it well. It was centrally functional to his society. The responsibility justified the privilege. So he worked. He lost weight; he walked light on the earth. Lack of physical labor, lack of variety of occupation, lack of social and sexual intercourse, none of these appeared to him as lacks, but as freedom. He was the free man: he could do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it for as long as he wanted to do it. And he did. He worked. He work/played.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1592-98 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 04:01 PM

During that autumn and winter he got more and more out of the habit of sleeping. A couple of hours at night and a couple more sometime during the day were enough for him, and such naps were not the kind of profound sleep he had always had before, but almost a waking on another level, they were so full of dreams. He dreamed vividly, and the dreams were part of his work. He saw time turn back upon itself, a river flowing upward to the spring. He held the contemporaneity of two moments in his left and right hands; as he moved them apart he smiled to see the moments separate like dividing soap bubbles. He got up and scribbled down, without really waking, the mathematical formula that had been eluding him for days. He saw space shrink in upon him like the walls of a collapsing sphere driving in and in towards a central void, closing, closing, and he woke with a scream for help locked in his throat, struggling in silence to escape from the knowledge of his own external emptiness.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1769-71 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 04:22 PM

“It’s all right, brother. It’ll be all right, little brother,” he muttered. Shevek heard him and felt his touch, but took no comfort in it. Even from the brother there is no comfort in the bad hour, in the dark at the foot of the wall.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1800-1804 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 10:28 PM

They told Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships to leu Eun was stiffer every year, proving the essential democracy of the institution. He said, “You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.” He liked his polite, intelligent students, but he felt no great warmth towards any of them. They were planning careers as academic or industrial scientists, and what they learned from him was to them a means to that end, success in their careers. They either had, or denied the importance of, anything else he might have offered them.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1826-31 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 10:33 PM

At first all this seemed funny to him; then it made him uneasy. He must not dismiss as ridiculous what was, after all, of tremendous importance here. He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1831-32 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 10:33 PM

admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1850-53 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 10:37 PM

And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1962-65 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 10:10 PM

You picked the wrong people to try to make brothers of! And if—I have no business saying this. But it doesn’t matter. If you won’t come to us in Thu, at least don’t give your Theory to the Ioti. Don’t give the usurers anything! Get out. Go home. Give your own people what you have to give!” “They don’t want it,” Shevek said, expressionless. “Do you think I did not try?”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2033-35 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 10:21 PM

It seemed that he talked to the same people every time: well dressed, well fed, well mannered, smiling. Were they the only kind of people on Urras? “It is pain that brings men together,” Shevek said standing up before them, and they nodded and said, “How true.” He began to hate them and, realizing that, abruptly ceased accepting their invitations.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2112-15 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 10:31 PM

A person likes to do what he is good at doing…. But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work’s sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one’s neighbors. There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One’s own pleasure, and the respect of one’s fellows. That is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mightly force.”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2175-80 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 10:41 PM

At some moments Shevek liked Desar, and at others detested him, for the same qualities. He stuck to him, however, deliberately, as part of his resolution to change his life. His illness had made him realize that if he tried to go on alone he would break down altogether. He saw this in moral terms, and judged himself ruthlessly. He had been keeping himself for himself, against the ethical imperative of brotherhood. Shevek at twenty-one was not a prig, exactly, because his morality was passionate and drastic; but it was still fitted to a rigid mold, the simplistic Odonianism taught to children by mediocre adults, an internalized preaching.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2237-39 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 10:54 PM

He went on writing letters to Urras, even when he mailed none of them at all. The fact of writing for someone who might understand—who might have understood—made it possible for him to write, to think. Otherwise it was not possible.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2253-56 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 10:58 PM

Three years here, and he had accomplished what? A book, appropriated by Sabul; five or six unpublished papers; and a funeral oration for a wasted life. Nothing he did was understood. To put it more honestly, nothing he did was meaningful. He was fulfilling no necessary function, personal or social. In fact—it was not an uncommon phenomenon in his field—he had burnt out at twenty. He would achieve nothing further. He had come up against the wall for good.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2313-18 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 09:48 PM

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing! Sabul uses you where he can, and where he can’t, he prevents you from publishing, from teaching, even from working. Right? In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn’t any. Not from intellectual excellence, he hasn’t any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That’s the power structure he’s part of, and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind.”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2348-52 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 09:55 PM

communities—anywhere that function demands expertise and a stable institution. But that stability gives scope to the authoritarian impulse. In the early years of the Settlement we were aware of that, on the lookout for it. People discriminated very carefully then between administering things and governing people. They did it so well that we forgot that the will to dominance is as central in human beings as the impulse to mutual aid is, and has to be trained in each individual, in each new generation. Nobody’s born an Odonian any more than he’s born civilized! But we’ve forgotten that.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2355-57 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 09:56 PM

Bedap seized his advantage relentlessly. “It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed.”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2395-97 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 10:00 PM

But who are these people you keep talking about—‘they’? ‘They’ drove him crazy, and so on. Are you trying to say that the whole social system is evil, that in fact ‘they,’ Tirin’s persecutors, your enemies, ‘they,’ are us—the social organism?”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2470-74 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 10:09 PM

Shevek thought of his own work and had nothing to say. Yet he could not join in Bedap’s criticism. Bedap had forced him to realize that he was, in fact, a revolutionary; but he felt profoundly that he was such by virtue of his upbringing and education as an Odonian and an Anarresti. He could not rebel against his society, because his society, properly conceived, was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process. To reassert its validity and strength, he thought, one need only act, without fear of punishment and without hope of reward: act from the center of one’s soul.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2580-84 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 10:36 PM

It was now clear to Shevek, and he would have thought it folly to think otherwise, that his wretched years in this city had all been part of his present great happiness, because they had led up to it, prepared him for it. Everything that had happened to him was part of what was happening to him now. Takver saw no such obscure concatenations of effect/cause/effect, but then she was not a temporal physicist. She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2610-11 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 10:40 PM

It had never occurred to Shevek that life could proliferate so wildly, so exuberantly, that indeed exuberance was perhaps the essential quality of life.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2669-79 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 10:50 PM

“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives…. But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. 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.” “That’s all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon—I don’t want it! But I’m not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, ‘O lovely!’ I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don’t give a hoot for eternity.” “It’s nothing to do with eternity,” said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. “All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. 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?” “Ah! your talk, your damned philosophy!” “Talk? It’s not talk. It’s not reason. It’s hand’s touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light—”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2695-97 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 10:52 PM

He had been co-opted—just as Chifoilisk had said. But he did not know how to break down the wall. And if he did, where could he go? The panic closed in on him tighter. To whom could he turn? He was surrounded on all sides by the smiles of the rich.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 3434-37 | Added on Saturday, October 23, 2010, 08:03 PM

in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful. A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential in the complexity of freedom.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 3461-66 | Added on Saturday, October 23, 2010, 08:09 PM

Rationing was strict; labor drafts were imperative. The struggle to grow enough food and to get the food distributed became conclusive, desperate. Yet people were not desperate at all. Odo wrote: “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole.” There was an undercurrent of joy, in that sense, in Abbenay that summer.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 3585-87 | Added on Saturday, October 23, 2010, 08:27 PM

It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 3618-22 | Added on Saturday, October 23, 2010, 08:33 PM

“Hell!” he said aloud. Pravic was not a good swearing language. It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist. “Oh, hell!” he repeated. He crumpled up Sabul’s grubby little note vindictively, and then brought his hands down clenched against the edge of the table, twice, three times, in his passion seeking pain. But there was nothing. There was nothing to be done and nowhere to be gone. He was left at last with the bedding to unroll, with lying down alone and getting to sleep, with evil dreams and without comfort.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 3704-11 | Added on Saturday, October 23, 2010, 08:45 PM

“I’m a physicist, not a functions analyst,” Shevek said amiably. “Every Odonian has to be a functions analyst. You’re thirty, aren’t you? By that age a man should know not only his cellular function but his organic function—what his optimum role is the social organism is. You haven’t had to think about that, perhaps, as much as most people—” “No. Since I was ten or twelve I’ve known what kind of work I had to do.” “What a boy thinks he likes to do isn’t always what his society needs from him.” “I’m thirty, as you say. Rather an old boy.” “You’ve reached that age in an unusually sheltered, protected environment. First the Northsetting Regional Institute—”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 3806-7 | Added on Sunday, October 24, 2010, 03:55 PM

He had thought to bargain with them, a very naïve anarchist’s notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 4005-9 | Added on Sunday, October 24, 2010, 11:42 PM

In peacetime he may sprout sentimental pacifism, but the grit’s there, underneath. The common soldier has always been our greatest resource as a nation. It’s how we became the leader we are.” “By climbing up on a pile of dead children?” Shevek said, but anger or, perhaps, an unadmitted reluctance to hurt the old man’s feelings, kept his voice muffled, and Atro did not hear him.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 4845-53 | Added on Friday, October 29, 2010, 12:08 AM

“Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras.”
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