Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
-
Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however - that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc
-
The backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.
-
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
-
Excess is excrement.
-
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
-
'There’s a point, around age twenty,' Bedap said, 'when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.'
-
Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.
-
You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!
-
What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
-
If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
-
The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
-
Sometimes one’s very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.
-
Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind, it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument.
-
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
-
No doors were locked, few shut. There were no disguises and no advertisements. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to the hand.
-
There are no right answers to wrong questions.
-
As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.
-
She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.
-
'A king has soldiers, servants, messengers, lieutenants. He governs through his servants. Where are the servants of this-Anti-king?''In our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live! The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple.'
-
'The mission I am on overrides all personal debts and loyalties.''If so,' said the stranger with fierce certainty, 'it is an immoral mission.'
-
Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
-
To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
-
I've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.