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I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.

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I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's...more

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It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.

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We came, Takver thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is ...more

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An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap-works. Partnership was a voluntarily con...more

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This concern, feebly called 'love of nature', seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus ha...more

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When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you ...more

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I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps.

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A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.

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Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using...more

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Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

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I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such inte...more

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A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.

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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? What is love of one's coun...more

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They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He wa...more