Excerpt from "A Man of the People" by Ursula K. Le Guin

"After a long silence, he nodded.

            She sat stricken, understanding that she had won. She had won badly.

            She reached across to him, trying to comfort him and herself. She was scared by the darkness in him, his grief, his mute acceptance of betrayal. But it wasn't betrayal - she rejected the word at once. She wouldn't betray him. They were in love. They loved each other. He would follow her in a year, two years at the most. They were adults, they must not cling together like children. Adult relationships are based on mutual freedom, mutual trust. She told herself all these things as she said them to him. He said yes, and held her, and comforted her. In the night, in the utter silence of the desert, the blood singing in his ears, he lay awake and though, 'It has died unborn. It was never conceived.'

            They stayed together in their little apartment at the School for the few more weeks before Tiu left. They made love cautiously, gently, talked about history and economics and ethnology, kept busy. Tiu had to prepare herself to work with the team she was going with, studying the Terran concepts of hiearchy; Zhiv had a paper to write on social-energy generation of Werel. They worked hard. Their friends gave Tiu a big farewell party. The next day Zhiv went with her to Ve Port. She kissed and held him, telling him to hurry, hurry and come to Terra. He saw her board the flyer that would take her up to the NAFAL ship waiting in orbit. He went back to the apartment on the South Campus of the School. There a friend found him three days later sitting at his desk in a curious condition, passive, speaking very slowly if at all, unable to eat or drink. Being pueblo-born, the friend recognized this state and called in the medicine man (the Hainish do not call them doctors). Having ascertained that he was from one of the Southern pueblos, the medicine man said, 'Havzhiva! The god cannot die in you here!'

            After a long silence the young man said softly in a voice which did not sound like his  voice, 'I need to go home.'

            'That is not possible now,' said the medicine man. 'But we can arrange a Staying chant while I find a person able to address the god.' He promptly put out a call for students who were ex-People of the South. Four responded. They sat all night with Havzhiva singing the Staying Chant in two languages and four dialects, until Havzhiva joined in a fifth dialect, whispering the words hoarsely, till he collapsed and slept for thirty hours.

            He woke in his own room. An old woman was having a conversation with nobody beside him. 'You aren't here,' she said. 'No, you are mistaken. You can't die here. It would not be right, it would be quite wrong. You now that. This is the wrong place. This is the wrong life. You know that! What are you doing here? Are you lost? Do you want to know the way home? Here it is. Listen.' She began singing in a thin, high voice, an almost tuneless, almost wordless song that was familiar to Havzhiva, as if he had heard it long ago. He fell asleep again while the old woman went on talking to nobody.

            When he woke again she was gone. He never knew who she was or where she came from; he never asked. She had spoke and sung in his own language, in the dialect of Stse."

--Ursula K. Le Guin, "A Man of the People," Four Ways to Forgiveness (Harper Perennial, 1995), pp. 153-155

Initiation Song from the Finder's Lodge

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

- Ursula K. Le Guin

From Always Coming Home (Harper & Row, 1985)

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."

Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (Bantam, 1993), p. 271

"Most talk of 'artistic detachment' is disingenuous. No writer can depict the whole world - even if, like Balzac, he makes a credible attempt. All he can do is offer 'typical samples,' like a grocer allowing you to taste a piece of cheese. But as he holds out the cheese to you on the end of his knife, he is clearly implying that this sample tastes exactly the same as the rest of the cheese on the counter. The same goes for the novelist; as he hands you his 'slice of life', there is a tacit understanding that, as far as he knows, this tastes very much like any other slice he could offer you."

Colin Wilson, The Craft of the Novel (Ashgrove Press, 1990), pp. 57.

"They are a very strange people, the Hainish; older than any of us; infinitely generous. They are altruists. They are moved by a guilt we don't even understand, despite all our crimes. They are moved in all they do, I think, by the past, their endless past."

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (Perennial Classics, 2003), pp. 348. 

"I remember thinking, Oh great, it's four in the morning and I'm having some sort of weird mystical experience right in the kitchen of one of my best friends, merely by touching a woman I've never met before. This is not going to be easy to explain..."

Ken Wilbur, Grace and Grit (Shambhala, 2000), pp. 9.

"The private world of instinctive interests is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins. Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a beleaguered fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of the will. In one way or another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this prison and this strife."

Bertrand Russell, "The Value Of Philosophy", The Problems Of Philosophy (Oxford, 1997), pp. 158.

"While reading books I write notes in the page margins and I circle and memorize certain lines and passages. The people in each book might be different, but the plotline is basically the same: Somebody is unhappy and they do dangerous and foolish things trying to become happy."

Sherman Alexie, "Scenes From A Life". Blasphemy (Grove Press, 2012), pp. 233.