Ex Libris Kirkland

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Subtitle An ambitious utopia
First Written 1974
Genre Scifi
Origin US
My Copy cheap paperback
First Read January 04, 2013

The Dispossessed



Picking this up again after reading some references about it elsewhere. I like this a lot more than I remember!

Noted on May 16, 2023

A scifi story about two twin planets - one much like ours, and another that operates without personal ownership. It's interesting, but I wanted to edit it down to a novella.

Noted on February 11, 2013

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.

Quoted on May 16, 2023

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

Quoted on May 16, 2023

And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.

Quoted on February 11, 2013

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

Quoted on February 11, 2013


Ex Libris Kirkland is a super-self-absorbed reading journal made by Matt Kirkland. Copyright © 2001 - .
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