Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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To hear, one must be silent.
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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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Manipulated, one manipulates others.
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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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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.
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I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.
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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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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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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.
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'What’s that all about?' Golden said to his wife, a rhetorical question. She looked at him and said nothing, a non-rhetorical answer.
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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.
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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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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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...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.
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The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
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He resolved not to speak again until he had controlled his temper.
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The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel.
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Statesmen remember things selectively.
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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.
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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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Ignorant power is a bane!
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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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Go to bed; tired is stupid.
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So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.