Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
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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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Favoritism, elitism, leader-worship, they crept back and cropped out everywhere. But she had never hoped to see them eradicated in her lifetime, in one generation; only Time works the great changes.
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It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
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Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.
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What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.
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A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.
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We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.
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'What harm have the trees done them?' he said. 'Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men.'
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'In innocence there is no strength against evil,' said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. 'But there is strength in it for good.'
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See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
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You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.
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... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
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It is light that defeats the dark.
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He resolved not to speak again until he had controlled his temper.
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In the self-important, Falco reflected, there is always room for a little more self-importance.
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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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Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
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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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I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
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All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
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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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Mr. Ai, we’ve seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they’d seem the same to us.
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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.