TODO_AUTHOR, (Le Guin 2002)
Summary
Thoughts
Notes
The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 327 | Location 5009-5013 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 1:57:42 AM
their official form, quickly become plutocracies (societies governed by the rich). Many socialists and communists argued that the path to reform lay through collective ownership of the means of production to ensure that there would be no rich. The transition to full economic democracy would be managed by a centralized, all-powerful government. Anarchists argued that such centralization could never lead to the hoped-for decentralized egalitarian society: centralization leads only to more centralization, they claimed. If people want freedom, they must claim it directly.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 3 | Location 42-43 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 2:05:52 AM
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.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 4 | Location 47-47 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 2:07:02 AM
It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 5 | Location 68-69 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 2:10:22 AM
He patted the thing he wore on his belt, a metal object like a deformed penis, and looked patronizingly at the unarmed woman.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 97-104 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 2:15:05 AM
For on the screen now was a strange sight, a great pallid plain of stone. It was the desert seen from the mountains above Grand Valley. How had he got back to Grand Valley? He tried to tell himself that he was in an airship. No, in a spaceship. The edge of the plain flashed with the brightness of light on water, light across a distant sea. There was no water in those deserts. What was he seeing, then? The stone plain was no longer plane but hollow, like a huge bowl full of sunlight As he watched in wonder it grew shallower, spilling out its light All at once a line broke across it, abstract, geometric, the perfect section of a circle. Beyond that arc was blackness. This blackness reversed the whole picture, made it negative. The real, the stone part of it was no longer concave and full of light but convex, reflecting, rejecting light. It was not a plain or a bowl but a sphere, a ball of white stone falling down in blackness, falling away. It was his world.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 8 | Location 120-120 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 2:17:31 AM
the one law held, the one law he had ever acknowledged.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 9 | Location 133-133 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 2:18:58 AM
he would never act again but by his own free choice.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 13 | Location 189-193 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 5:14:07 AM
He was putting on his old clothes, and as he pulled the shirt over his head he saw the doctor stuff the blue and yellow “sleeping clothes” into the “trash” bin. Shevek paused, the collar still over his nose. He emerged fully, knelt, and opened the bin. It was empty. “The clothes are burned?” “Oh, those are cheap pajamas, service issue—wear ’em and throw ’em away, it costs less than cleaning.” “It costs less,” Shevek repeated meditatively. He said the words the way a paleontologist looks at a fossil, the fossil that dates a whole stratum.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 208-208 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 5:16:03 AM
“The creation of pseudo-species, Odo called it.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 15 | Location 218-219 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 5:17:53 AM
they often used the word “higher” as a synonym for “better” in their writings, where an Anarresti would use “more central.”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 15 | Location 224-224 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 5:19:32 AM
Categories: the Fourth Mode.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 233-236 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 5:20:56 AM
Kimoe’s ideas never seemed to be able to go in a straight line; they had to walk around this and avoid that, and then they ended up smack against a wall. There were walls around all his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of them, though he was perpetually hiding behind them. Only once did Shevek see them breached, in all their days of conversation between the worlds.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 243-243 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 5:22:15 AM
Kimoe tried to explain status, failed, and went back to the first topic.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 244-248 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 5:23:07 AM
“Well, no, it seems a very mechanical basis for the division of labor, doesn’t it? A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength—what has the sex to do with that?” “Men are physically stronger,” the doctor asserted with professional finality. “Yes, often, and larger, but what does that matter when we have machines? And even when we don’t have machines, when we must dig with the shovel or carry on the back, the men maybe work faster—the big ones— but the women work longer. . . . Often I have wished I was as tough as a woman.”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 257-259 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 5:25:22 AM
This matter of superiority and inferiority must be a central one in Urrasti social life. If to respect himself Kimoe had to consider half the human race as inferior to him, how then did women manage to respect themselves—did they consider men inferior? And how did all that affect their sex lives?
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 26 | Location 399-401 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 5:37:51 AM
The director stood up. He was about twice as tall and three times as heavy as his opponent, and it was clear in his face that he disliked the child intensely; but there was no threat of physical violence in his stance, only an assertion of authority, a little weakened by his irritable response to the child’s odd question.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 40 | Location 605-606 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 5:54:41 AM
Would you really like to live in a society where you had no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go to live in a prison?”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 40 | Location 606-608 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 5:54:54 AM
“Oh, hell, no. Can’t I talk? The trouble with you, Shev, is you don’t say anything till you’ve saved up a whole truckload of damned heavy brick arguments, and then you dump them all out and never look at the bleeding body mangled beneath the heap—”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 50 | Location 767-767 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 6:10:44 AM
Keep free. Power inheres in a center. You’re going to the center.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 51 | Location 781-787 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 6:12:57 AM
Tirin got himself up in a collection of rags from the recycle bin and wandered among them as the Poor Urrasti, the Beggarman—one of the Iotic words everybody had learned in history. “Give me money,” he whined, shaking his hand under their noses. “Money! Money! Why don’t you give me any money? You haven’t got any? Liars! Filthy propertarians! Profiteers! Look at all that food, how did you get it if you haven’t any money?” He then offered himself for sale. “Bay me, bay me, for just a little money,” he wheedled. “It isn’t bay, it’s buy,” Rovab corrected him. “Bay me, buy me, who cares, look, what a beautiful body, don’t you want it?” Tirin crooned, wagging his slender hips and batting his eyes. He was at last publicly executed with a
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 62 | Location 947-948 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 12:42:56 PM
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 970-972 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 12:45:55 PM
“You Odonians let women study science?” Oiie inquired. “Well, they are in the sciences, yes.” “Not many, I hope.” “Well, about half.”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 71 | Location 1081-1087 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 12:56:07 PM
He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and, contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anarresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work—his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy—and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 73 | Location 1110-1111 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 12:58:11 PM
In fact, despite the ovation, Shevek had the curious feeling that nobody had heard it.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Your Highlight on page 77 | Location 1174-1175 | Added on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 1:03:17 PM
The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile.
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