Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
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.'
-
Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.
-
The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.
-
A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.
-
Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
-
You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit or, it is nowhere.
-
Where my guides lead me in kindness I follow, follow lightly, and there are no footprints in the dust behind us.
-
It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
-
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.
-
I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.
-
Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
-
Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.
-
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
-
It is light that defeats the dark.
-
By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.
-
All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
-
All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
-
He resolved not to speak again until he had controlled his temper.
-
He had almost yielded, but not quite. He had not consented. It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
-
... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
-
I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
-
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
-
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
-
Why should he remember her? Why should she remember him? She had other things to think about. She was a grown woman. She had to face life. Even if all life had to show her was a locked door, and behind the locked door, no room.