You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.

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To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.

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The trouble is, women have to be absolutely first class to get where third-class men get.

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Time is not duration but intensity; time is the beat and the interval [...]

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Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

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I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls.

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Go to bed; tired is stupid.

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Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.

—The Creation of Éa

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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

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For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.

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We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

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No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.

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He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.

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As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.

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A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

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To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

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He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.

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I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

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The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

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To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side.

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