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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“Well, what if they do come? What will they want of you?" "To be what I was." The desolation of his voice chilled her. She was silent, trying to remember what it was like to have been powerful, to be the Eaten One, the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, and then to lose that, throw it away, become only Tenar, only herself. She thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerless. But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame.”

“Well, what is there to do around here, anyway?" "Well, here we have World Domination; it builds strategy skills—you can play as a dog, a boot, or a trebuchet." Bewilder builds language and observation skills..." "I said I wanted to play VIDEO games." "Video games are a waste of time." "And board games AREN'T? Why do you even have these? No one lives here but you!" "I used to have some henchmen. Game night was a big hit." "Henchmen? What happened to them?" "I can't work with mercenaries. It's impossible to build trust when they only care about their paychecks. " "Oooh. Let me guess. The Institution paid them off?" "I don't want to talk about it.”

“Well, what of it? I've not given up thinking of death. It's true that it's high time I was dead; and that all this is nonsense. It's the truth I'm telling you. I do value my idea and my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great - ideas, work - it's all dust and ashes.”

“Well, what you ding this kind of work for--against your own people?" "Three dollars a day. I got damn sick of creeping for my dinner--and not getting it. I got a wife and kids. We got to eat. Three dollars a day and it comes every day." "But for your three dollars a day fifteen or twenty families can't eat at all. Nearly a hundred people have to go and wander on the roads for your three dollars a day. Is that right?" "Can't think of that. Got to think of my own kids." *** "Nearly a hundred people on the road for your three dollars. Where will we go?" "And that reminds me, you better get out soon. I'm going through the dooryard after dinner...I got orders wherever there's a family not moved out--if I have an accident--you know, get too close and cave in the house a little--well, I might get a couple of dollars. And my youngest kid never had no shoes yet." "I built this with my hands...It's mine. I built it. You bump it down--I'll be in the window with a rifle..." "It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'll lose my job if I don't do it. And look--suppose you kill me? They'll just hang you, but not long before you're hung there'll be another guy on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not killing the right guy." *** Across the dooryard the tractor cut, and the hard, foot-beaten ground was seeded field, and the tractor cut through again; the uncut space was ten feet wide. And back he came. The iron guard bit into the house-corner, crumbled the wall and wrenched the house from its foundation so that it fell sideways,crushed like a bug...The tenant man stared after [the tractor], his rifle in his hand. His wife beside him, and the quiet children behind. And all of them stared after the tractor.”

“Well, when you do want to marry, what do you want him to be like?” I baited, playfully jabbing her in the ribs with a piece of driftwood. “And don’t kid around.” … Tilting her head back, she thought for a moment and then said quite honestly, “Like a familiar sweet dream. The kind you dream every so often and can’t remember when you wake up, but you long to dream all day long. Or like a favorite book you loved as a child and forgot about until you found it in an old box in the closet.”

“Well, where does that leave us with regard to social action and practice? The answer is very far away. There still remains an enormous gap between what we have to grasp in order to ground moral action, to choose a course of action on moral grounds. An enormous gap between that and what we, in fact, understand about human nature and the human needs that derive from it, and the human rights that derive from it. Big gap. So, we are left where we were, with the need to make an intuitive leap and to posit some judgment about what real, intrinsic human nature is. In a sense, you're staking your faith in what you think or hope human beings may be. Now, if you take as your faith that of, say, the classical liberal doctrine, you will conclude that there is no justification, there's no moral justification for the commissar, the central committee, or the cultural or corporate manager, or any of the others who control and coerce us on species grounds. The actual classical liberal view, which is very different from what is known with its deep innatist roots, is very subversive and radical because it challenges the existence of any form of authority and requires that it be justified, which can rarely be done. It's not too surprising, I think, that the actual ideas of the Enlightenment have been subjected to such a broad-ranging attack. They are radical and subversive because of the faith that they express in human capacity, and human rights, and human needs, and their richness. And that's a deeply upsetting view from the point of view of any institutional structure which is concerned with control and manipulation, or any of the people who operate within those institutional structures. Well, if one takes this position, the next thing to do is to make the intuitive leap and turn to the concrete substantive questions of acting as a moral agent, choosing a course of action. And here what you do is seek out structures of authority and domination. Often we don't see them, so you have to try to find them even though they're there. Once you notice them, you see them and seek them out. Ask the question as to whether they, in fact, are legitimate for some contingent reason, say, self-defense or whatever argument is put forth. And if they fail that test, as they almost invariably do, to move forward to dismantle them, which means solidarity, organization, and so on. That's a hard task. But there are achievements. There are real achievements. For most of human history, for example, literal human slavery was considered legitimate. In fact, considered quite praiseworthy. It was for the benefit of these depraved creatures who shouldn't be left on their own. It's only a little tiny period of human history where this is considered a total obscenity. And the fact that it is considered a total obscenity is an achievement. In the 18th century, it was pointed out that wage slavery is fundamentally not very different from slavery. If people are compelled to rent themselves in order to survive, it's not very different than selling yourself in order to survive. That's an insight that has yet to be recovered, but it's a valid one. And, in fact, notice that it grows from these same conceptions of human nature. But, at least, literal human slavery would no longer be justified by, I suppose, almost anyone. That's an achievement. It's a moral achievement. It's a moral advance. Just in our own lifetimes, the questions of the legitimacy of sexist oppression have come to the fore. It's not like anybody noticed before, but there's been a sustained and committed effort to bring them to consciousness. And it's not long ago, anybody my age will know, that it's not long ago they just didn't see it, notice it. It was just part of the background. Now, at least you see it. The problems are there, but it's a moral advance that the problems are recognized to be there. There's some effort to come to terms with them.”

“Well, with every pirouette, we entrust the weight of our bodies on the tips of our toes, with the promise of them delivering us in cyclones. Our arms, always elegant it may appear, struggle beneath the heaviness our muscles battle to stay fluid. It looks effortless--- every allongé, every piqué as simple as the natural flow of water. But every dance, every move our bodies make, is a war against itself. It's magnificently dangerous. Like... blooming into an ocean. That's what it feels like. An ocean. Deep and rich all-encompassing, drowning out everyone in our presence. They sink into the moment, succumb to every movement, and simply just admire.”

“Well, without at least some optimism writing anything is impossible -- you have to believe that someone out there will be reading what you write. Even more so for science fiction for me -- we're thinking and writing about the future, so to a greater or lesser extent we're thinking that there will be a future to participate in, and that people will be there to tell us what we got right and what we got wrong. Even dystopian literature often trades in hope of some form -- people fighting against the dystopia, for example. There will always be specific counter-examples, but I think generally science fiction has optimism baked in. We believe in the future, even if there's a long slog between where we are now and where we will go.”

“Well, women with breast cancer are warriors, also. I have been to war, and still am. So has every woman who had had one or both breasts amputated because of the cancer that is becoming the primary physical scourge of our time. For me, my scars are an honorable reminder that I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still going on, and I am still a part of it. I refuse to have my scars hidden or trivialized behind lambswool or silicone gel. I refuse to be reduced in my own eyes or in the eyes of others from warrior to mere victim, simply because it might render me a fraction more acceptable or less dangerous to the still complacent, those who believe if you cover up a problem it ceases to exist. I refuse to hide my body simply because it might make a woman-phobic world more comfortable.”

“Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes. Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange. Some, downright weird. But then again, you’d have to be. To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors.”