Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Nobody had made this wilderness, and there was no evil in it and no good; it simply was.
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He always asked, why thus? why this way, not another way? I answered: Because in what we do daily and in the way we do it, we enact the gods. He said: Then the gods are only what we do. I said: In what we do rightly, the gods are.
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I have become very critical of the whole book award system and could preach on that subject for quite a while, but I do know what an award can mean to a writer early in her career. It can give an essential validation.
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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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To hear, one must be silent.
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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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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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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.
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Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.
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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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The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.
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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.
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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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Ignorant power is a bane!
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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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Where my guides lead me in kindness I follow, follow lightly, and there are no footprints in the dust behind us.
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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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One voice, speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time; plenty of time.
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It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
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Grow up. Grow up. Time to grow up. You’re here now. We’re working on physics here, not religion. Drop the mysticism and grow up.
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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.
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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.