So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives.… - Ursula K. Le Guin

The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

There is not much good spending twelve hours a day in a black hole in the ground all your life long if there’s nothing there, no secret, no treasure, nothing hidden.

How men feared women! she thought, walking among the late-flowering roses. Not as individuals, but women when they talked together, worked together, spoke up for one another - then men saw plots, cabals, constraints, traps being laid. Of course they were right. Women were likely, as women, to take the next generations part, not this one's; they wove the links men saw as chains, the bonds men saw as bondage.

Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.