Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
The High-Intelligence Life Forms of the planet, of which there were at least three species, all of low technological achievement, they would ignore or enslave or extirpate, whichever was most convenient. For to an aggressive people only technology mattered.
-
It may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.
-
This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
-
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.
-
To see a candle’s light, one must take it into a dark place.
-
The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.
-
Mede spoke with amused tolerance, as physicists generally speak of biologists.
-
You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.
-
If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.
-
It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow.
-
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.
-
Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
-
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
-
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing!
-
I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.
-
I haven't any strength, I haven't any character, I'm a born tool. I haven't any destiny. All I have is dreams. And now other people run them.
-
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.
-
No, I don’t understand him, but he is worth listening to.
-
Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.
-
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
-
To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.
-
The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
-
I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
-
There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.