Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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.
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I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying. It would be foolish to worry about anything while one died.
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Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.
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Ignorant power is a bane!
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The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.
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Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.
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This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
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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!
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To hear, one must be silent.
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To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.
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There is not much good spending twelve hours a day in a black hole in the ground all your life long if there’s nothing there, no secret, no treasure, nothing hidden.
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I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'
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Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
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They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!
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As she stumbled forward she cried out in her mind, which was as dark, as shaken as the subterranean vault, 'Forgive me. O my Masters, O unnamed ones, most ancient ones, forgive me, forgive me!'There was no answer. There had never been an answer.
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Favoritism, elitism, leader-worship, they crept back and cropped out everywhere. But she had never hoped to see them eradicated in her lifetime, in one generation; only Time works the great changes.
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
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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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One voice, speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time; plenty of time.
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'What harm have the trees done them?' he said. 'Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men.'
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Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.
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What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.
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A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.