That sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate

How does one hate a country, or love one? [...] I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain lowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.

Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p. 212

Primitiveness and civilisation are degrees of the same thing

It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilisation, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness... Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth,  and primitiveness and civilisation are degrees of the same thing. If civilisation has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.

Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p. 101

Unproof is the ground of action

"The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable – the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?"
"That we shall die."
"Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."

Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p.70

The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

[...]

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading believe every word of it. Finally, when we are done with it, we may find – if it's a good novel – that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But its' very hard to say just what we learned, how we are changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Ursula K. Le Guin, 'Introduction' in The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p. xvi

The substance of their world was forest

At first on Athshe he had felt oppressed and uneasy in the forest, stifled by its endless crowd and incoherence of trunks, branches, leaves in the perpetual greenish or brownish twilight. The mass and jumble of various competitive lives all pushing and swelling outwards and upwards towards light, the silence made up of many little meaningless noises, the total vegetable indifference to the presence of mind, all this had troubled him, and like the others he had kept to clearings and to the beach.
[...]
So earth, terra, tellus mean both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (The Orion Publishing Group, 2015) p. 72

The world is always new

"The world is always new," said Coro Mean, "however old its roots."

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (The Orion Publishing Group, 2015) p. 32

The pursuit of art is the pursuit of liberty

The pursuit of art, then, by artist or audience, is the pursuit of liberty. If you accept that, you see at once why truly serious people reject and mistrust the arts, labelling them as "escapism". The captured soldier tunnelling out of prison, the runaway slave, and Solzhenitsyn in exile, are escapists. Aren't they? The definition also helps explain why all healthy children can sing, dance, paint, and play with words; why art is an increasingly important element in psychotherapy; why Winston Churchill painted, why mothers sing cradle-songs, and what is wrong with Plato's Republic.

Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (The Orion Publishing Group, 2015) p. 6

Any rule is tyranny

If we must all agree, all work together, we're no better than a machine. If an individual can't work in solidarity with his fellows, it's his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We've been saying, more and more often, you must work with others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society formed upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. 'The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.' We can't stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (Gollancz, 2002) pp. 295-296

Fulfilment is a function of time

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.
[...]
Fulfilment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety-seeking of the spectator, the thrill-hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.
It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (Gollancz, 2002) pp. 275-276

Time has two aspects

Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isn't it? And two orbits, two years; and so on, one can count the orbits endlessly – an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time – it constitutes the time-teller, the clock. But within the system, the cycle, where is time? Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or non-cyclic process, to be seen as temporal. Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tony time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
[...]
Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore... If the mind is able to perceive time in both these ways, then a true chonosophy should provide a field in which relation of the two aspects or processes of time could be understood.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (Gollancz, 2002) pp. 185-186

It is only in consciousness that we experience time

It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can't distance himself form the past and understand how it relates to his present, or plan how his present might relate to his future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time. What past is it the tale means when it says 'Once upon a time'? And so, when the mystic makes the reconnection of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 184

The way to see how beautiful life is

"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 lose the pattern. You need distance – interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."
"That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon – I don't want it! But I'm not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say O lovely! I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity."
"It's nothing to do with eternity," said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. "All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 158

The artist shares

But how can they justify this kind of censorship? You write music! Music is a cooperative art, organic by definition, social. It may be the noblest form of social behaviour we're capable of. It's certainly one of the noblest jobs an individual can undertake. And by its nature, buy the nature of any art, it's a sharing. The artist shares, it's the essence of his act.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 146

In the rites of the moneychangers

He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 109

The past becomes the future

As surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future. To deny is not to achieve. The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forego the possibility of return. 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.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 76

Home is a place where you have never been

You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 48