The Left Hand of Darkness Quotes

“The coldness of it was perpetually incredible. Every morning I had to believe it all over again.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“I was taught as child on my homeworld that Thruth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“I was taught as child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“His loyalty extended without disproportion to things, the patient, obstinate, reliable things that we use and get used to, the things we live by.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Nusuth.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“I am without a face among men. I am not seen. I speak and am not heard. I come and am not welcomed. There is no place by the fire for me, nor food on the table for me, nor a bed for me to lie in. Yet I still have my name: Getheren is my name. That name I lay on this hearth as a curse, and with it my shame. Keep that for me. Now nameless I will go seek my death.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“An enemy, in Karhide, is not a stranger, an invader. The stranger who comes unknown i a guest. Your enemy is your neighbour.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“All my leaves are seen, but one, this ona in the darkness cast by all the others. This one leaf I keep secret to myself. Who will see it in the darkness of my leaves? and who will count the number of them?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, [The Left Hand of Darkness] [by: Ursula K. Le Guin]

“The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. . . .”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be (as Nim put it) “tied down to childbearing,” implies that no one is quite so thoroughly “tied down” here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be—psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“As with most mammals other than man, coitus can be performed only by mutual invitation and consent; otherwise it is not possible.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed,”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“It was odd that in the less primitive society, the more sinister note was struck.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it’s an easy name to call another man; a name that sticks, that fits, that convinces. I was half convinced myself.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“both must stop following the road they’re on, in either direction; they must go somewhere else, and break the circle.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“In Karhide king and kyorremy have a good deal of control over what people do, but very little over what they hear, and none over what they say. Here, the government can check not only act but thought. Surely no men should have such power over others.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Ah, you were consciously extending the evolutionary tendency inherent in Being; one manifestation of which is exploration”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“He loved his country very dearly, sir, but he did not serve it, or you. He served the master I serve.” “The Ekumen?” said Argaven, startled. “No. Mankind.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“that spirituality and scientific curiosity can go hand in hand.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“A novelist's business is lying.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find -- if it's a good novel -- that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to *say* just what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this *in words*. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“The prestige-competition", heretofore mostly economic, might force Karhide to emulate its larger neighbor, to become a nation instead of a family quarrel, as Estraven had said; to become, as Estraven had also said, patriotic. If this occurred the Gethenians might have an excellent chance of achieving the condition of war.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“I woke.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“One feels the man's power as an augmentation of his character; he cannot make an empty gesture or say a world that is not listened to. He knows it, and the knowledge gives him more reality than most people own: a solidness of being, a substantiality, a human grandeur.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness