The Left Hand of Darkness

"Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration"

"We are not monsters. We are people"

"In the moment of action there is often peace"

"A man who doesn't know how to die doesn't know how to live"

"To love is to be vulnerable."

"Kings are slaves to their crowns."

"The road is both a prison and a liberation."

"Treachery is a matter of perspective."

"The walls between nations are made of fear."

"We need not know one another, but we must see one another."

"To act is to commit oneself."

"Preying on one another is what men do, what men are."

"Friendship is not a mild thing."

"The bonds between people are formed by shared suffering."

"There's no escape: we pay for the violence of our ancestors."

"The dead cannot praise the truth, the living must."

"Love is the most violent of all solvents."

"A man in a strange land will either adapt or die."

"Shame is a very specific feeling: the feeling that one is justly humiliated."

"I had come to Gethen as an emissary, but I was becoming something else."

"Alone, I didn't know the terrain. With Estraven, I was not alone, but I still didn't know the terrain."

"One cannot ask anything of the dead. It is the living we must ask."

"Truth is a matter of the imagination."

"A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, but first and foremost every human being wants to be treated as an intelligent adult."

"I had to unlearn what I thought I knew."

"The shifgrethor is the only thing that holds us together."

"The cold clarifies thought."

"Kinship is not mere genetics."

"I am not afraid of Estraven; I am afraid of myself."

"There is a whole world, whole worlds, beyond the walls."