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"They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, 'Arek!' Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark."
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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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"One of the hardest things you will ever have to go through is the death of a child. The second hardest thing you will ever have to go through is having a child die at Christmas time. The third hardest thing you will ever have to go through is telling your child that their friend and family member has passed away. The bittersweet moment that pulls you through it all is when your child says, "Mom don't cry. They're okay because they are with God now and they promise not to leave until they help you get through this."
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Personal Development

"You don't know who is important to you until you actually lose them."
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Personal Development

"Great losses are great lessons."
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Personal Development

"But Grover's voice was already growing fainter. 'Sweet dreams. Don't let me die!"
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Personal Development

"Tiffany found her mind filling up with an invisible gray mist, and in that thought there was nothing but grief. She could feel herself trying to push back time, but even the best witchcraft could not do that."
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Personal Development

"It had been in their hands then; he was quite sure of it. But kids lose everything, kids have slippery fingers and holes in their pockets and they lose everything."
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Personal Development

"And there were some things I didn't know I had until I lost them."
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Personal Development

"She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together."
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Personal Development

"He felt a strange pang. It was, perhaps, the fault of old Mr Jonathan, speaking of Juliet... No Juliet here - unless perhaps one could imagine Juliet a survivor - living on, deprived of Romeo... Was it not an essential part of Juliet's make-up that that she should die young?"
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Personal Development

"Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground."
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Personal Development
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