In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way round: th… - Ursula K. Le Guin

He had been a handsome man, when they married, fourteen years ago. A handsome, happy man, proud and kind, very good at his work. There had been a splendor to him, a wholeness.
That was gone. There was no more room in the world for whole people, they took up too much space. What she had done to him was only a part of the general program for cutting him and people like him down to size, for chopping and paring and breaking up, so that in the texture of life nothing large, nothing hard, nothing grand should remain.

"If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then the next day you probably do much the same again — if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time....

[T]he proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us." — "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction"

A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.