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"He looked at me. His firm, broad face showed weight-loss in deep shadows under the cheekbones, his eyes were sunken and his mouth sorely chapped and cracked. God knows what I looked like, when he looked like that. He smiled. 'With luck we shall make it, and without luck we shall not.'"
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"Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I went on through the Sinoth Valley, through the evening of his death, into the cold country that lies beyond fear. There I found you can weep all you like, but there's no good in it."
Emotion

"If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life."
Leadership

"The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them."
Philosophy

"We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone."
Mindset

"If the rowan's roots are shallow, it bears no crown."
Nature

"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."
Love

"Cinders patter, falling with the snow. We creep infinitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself. Praise then Creation unfinished!"
Philosophy

"Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing."
Love

"I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point."
Gender

"He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. 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."
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"Just to keep the bad dreams at bay, she took a swig out of a bottle that smelled of apples and happy brain-death."
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Personal Development

"Money is good, but I prefer food, water, gold, weapon and energy."
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Personal Development

"Fish are small, but do not drown in the sea. Ships are big, but sink in the ocean."
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Personal Development

"To a hungry person, every bitter food is sweet. When the preferable is not available, the available becomes preferable!"
Author Name
Personal Development

"That's a funny thing: you think, when awful things happen, everything else just stops, like you would forget to pee and eat and get thirsty, but it's not really true. It's like you and your body are two separate things, like your body is betraying you, chugging on, idiotic and animal, craving water and sandwiches and bathroom breaks while your world falls apart."
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Personal Development

"Sometimes a man must fight so hard for life that he doesn't have time to live it."
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Personal Development

"I want you to go back into the barrack and tell the men to come out after the storm. Tell them to look up at me tied here. Tell them I'll open my eyes and look back at them, and they'll know hat I survived."
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Personal Development

"If a negative viewer looks at you with an ugly fiendish eye, find a way and pluck off his eyes, or better still, protect your good image."
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Personal Development

"It's more like the anger what keep us alive, if yoh are Happy - you are fucking open to dead."
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Personal Development

"Percy: I thought I'd lost my mom forever, and I was stuck on a hill in a thunderstorm fighting this huge bull dude while Grover was passed out wailing. "Food! It was terrifying, man."
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Personal Development
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