Fulfillment

Fulfillment is a function of time.

The search for pleasure is
circular, repetitive, atemporal.

The variety seeking of
the spectator,
the thrill hunter,
the promiscuous,
always ends in the same place.

It comes to the end
and has to start over.

It is not a journey and return,
but a closed cycle,
a locked room,
a cell.

It is not until an act occurs
within the landscape
of the past and the future
that it is a human act.

Loyalty, which asserts the
continuity of past and future,
binding time in a whole,
is the foot of mans strength;

there is no good to be done without it.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
(arranged quote)

Different Stripes

The consciousness of difference
in a child
may be very painful;

for, having done nothing
yet, and
being incapable
of doing anything,

the young person
cannot justify
that difference.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
(arranged quote)

What you need

Nothing's wrong with pleasure,
or wanting it.

Only,
if it is not
what you need,

and you take it,
take what it is you don't need,

you will never
get to what it is
you do need.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
(arranged quote)

Flux

You shall not go down twice
to the same river, nor can you
go home again.

What is most changeable
is shown to be 
   fullest of eternity,
and your relationship to the river,
and the river's relationship to you 
   and to itself,
turns out to be at once more complex 
   and more reassuring 
than a mere lack of identity.

You can go home again,
so long as you understand
that home is a place
where you have never been.

-- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
(who was paraphrasing Heraclitus)
(edited, arranged quote)