Ursula Le Guin

But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.

letter sent me a couple of years ago by a young reader, who wrote:
The city of happiness, well, we all live there and people go about their business with full knowledge of the child in the closet.
And then at times I refuse to believe we are in the city of happiness and that instead we are all ones who walked away. Until I read in the news that a man was waterboarded 103 times in one month. Then I think we are all in the closet. Too stupid to understand what life we could have outside the walls around us

To me the “female principle” is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic

the truth is a matter of the imagination.

44th diurnal of the Year 1491,

The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.

Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

Freighters came down only eight times a year,

will go to Abbenay and unbuild walls

e had promised himself that he would never act again but by his own free choice