Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
Book 1969
The Left Hand of Darkness quotes
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About the book
Genly Ai, an envoy from a league of human worlds, arrives alone on the frozen planet Gethen, whose people are neither male nor female, to invite them to join. As he navigates the politics of two rival nations, he must learn to trust a Gethenian statesman whose motives he cannot read.
6 quotes
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. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here "all roads lead to Mishnory." To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere…
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows…