"The Dispossessed" and "The Stars My Destination"

“You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you...Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you. Pigs, you! All right, God damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars.”

“Be grateful that you only see the outward man. Be grateful that you never see the passions, the hatreds, the jealousies, the malice, the sicknesses... Be grateful you rarely see the frightening truth in people.”

Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination


"There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on."

"Change is freedom, change is life. It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed. There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls."

“If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you loose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."

“The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia.



Today, we pass over the quotes from some books with Anas. I wish we could do it more often.

Especially i am hitting the wall when i read "got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties" and "the way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.""... i feel guilty because of the times that i don't smile. Even if i knew all these quotes before, sometimes, things break me down.

I have my freedom. What else do i want? Is it really possible a language without the words "me", "I", "my" and "mine"? Could we live without possessing anything?

Literature is good.