Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
-
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
-
The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.
-
Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.
-
It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done?
-
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
-
But maybe you're just as glad he’s not a shrink, eh? Awful to have your spouse analyzing your unconscious desires across the dinner table, eh?
-
In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell.
-
I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
-
The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
-
Is power that-an emptiness?
-
Ch. 9 (pp. 298-9)
-
From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
-
We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.
-
You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, "Am I popular?" I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.
-
The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We can’t stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.
-
When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.
-
Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.
-
If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ...But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
-
'Long ago we parted,' said the slight, still man of the Fiia. 'Longer ago we were one. What we are not, they are. What we are, they are not. Think of the sunlight and the grass and the trees that bear fruit, Semley; think that not all roads that lead down lead up as well.'
-
When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
-
It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
-
The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars.
-
'But you knew them to be evil men-''Was I to join them therefore? To let their acts rule my own? I will not make their choices for them, nor will I let them make mine for me!'