Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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What's to gain by silence?
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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.
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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.
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No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty.
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They had learned how to listen for the sense of the meeting, not the voice of the loudest. They had learned that they must judge each time whether obedience was necessary and right, or misplaced and wrong. They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit’s strength lies in holding fast to the truth.
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'We're not outside the world, yoz. You know? We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see?'
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
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Obsessed with tricking the girl, he had fallen into the trap he laid for her. Bitterly he recognised that he was always believing his own lies, caught in nets he had elaborately woven.
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To hear, one must be silent.
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Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger.
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Go to bed; tired is stupid.
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Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.
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Before the gods and after, always, are the streams. Caves, stones, hills. Trees. The earth. The darkness of the earth.
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The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.
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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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If they come prying they can leave curious.
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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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Men who fight wars in Winter don’t live till Spring.
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And the rest, all the rest. All the days and lights and winds and years that would have been, and that would not be, that should be and were not, because he was dead. Shot dead on the road, in the wind, at twenty-one. His mountains unclimbed, never to be climbed.
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A great deal of her obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with words and ideas. Nobody had ever taught her to think consecutively. Nobody had ever listened to what she said. All that was expected, all that was wanted of her was muddle, mystery, mumbling. She was a witchwoman. She had nothing to do with clear meaning.
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Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.
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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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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.