Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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He resolved not to speak again until he had controlled his temper.
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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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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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Statesmen remember things selectively.
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She too had lost her luck, and known death, and gone on.
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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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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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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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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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What's to gain by silence?
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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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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.
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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.
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If they come prying they can leave curious.
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No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty.
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Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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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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Go to bed; tired is stupid.
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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.
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I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
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'It is not right to want to die,' the Summoner said....'For the very old, the very ill, it may be. But life is given us. Surely it’s wrong not to hold and treasure that great gift!''Death also is given us,' said the king.
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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?'