Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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'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.'
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What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one musn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...Insofar as I love life, I love [my country], but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.
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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?
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Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman's power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.
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Almost everything is double like that for adolescents; their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall; they see through everything, and are blind.
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I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?
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It is not human to be without shame and without desire.
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The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.
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Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.
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It's probably simply a matter of temperament that I never stopped to wonder if I could "match" what I had done, never choked off my writing by competing with myself, or with anybody else for that matter. My ambition was absolutely centered on the work itself, never on what it would bring me, or "who" it would make me. I never cared about that at all.
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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.
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If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself
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Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.
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And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?
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For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.
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The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.
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She saw time naively as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.
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If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
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What is a woman's power then?" she asked. "I don't think we know." "When has a woman power because she's a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while..." "In her house, maybe." She looked around the kitchen. "But the doors are shut," she said, "the doors are locked." "Because you're valuable." "Oh yes. We're precious. So long as we're powerless.
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You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.
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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?
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Is power that-an emptiness?
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Ch. 9 (pp. 298-9)
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At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.