Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
She too had lost her luck, and known death, and gone on.
-
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.
-
'The first lesson on Roke, and the last is, Do what is needful! And no more.''The lessons in between, then, must consist in learning what is needful.''They do.'
-
There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
-
In the self-important, Falco reflected, there is always room for a little more self-importance.
-
If they come prying they can leave curious.
-
Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.
-
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.
-
There is nothing important except people. A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.
-
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.
-
'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?'
-
'What’s that all about?' Golden said to his wife, a rhetorical question. She looked at him and said nothing, a non-rhetorical answer.
-
All the mystery and wisdom of the Masters, when it’s out in the daylight, doesn’t amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade-wonderful illusions. But people don’t want to know that. They want the illusions, the mysteries. Who can blame them? There’s so little in life that’s beautiful or worthy.
-
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.
-
Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.
-
What's to gain by silence?
-
To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.
-
...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.
-
No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty.
-
They say Mars absolves the warrior from the crimes of war, but those who were not the warriors, those for whom the war was said to be fought, even though they never wanted it to be fought, who absolves them?
-
To hear, one must be silent.