Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Shelley was kicked out of Oxford-I think the story is unauthenticated, but who cares-because he painted a sign on the end wall of a dead-end alley: THIS WAY TO HEAVEN. I feel that every now and then his sign needs repainting.
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'There’s nothing to fear, Lebannen,' he said gently, mockingly. 'They were only the dead.'
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'Summon up a supper,' he said. 'Oh, I could. On golden plates, if you like. But that’s illusion, and when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.'
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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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Her left hand reminded her of its existence, and she looked round to see what was scratching the heel of her hand. It was a tiny thistle, crouched in a crack in the sandstone, barely lifting its colorless spikes into the light and wind. It nodded stiffly as the wind blew, resisting the wind, rooted in rock. She gazed at it for a long time.
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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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The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.
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He liked the vast openness of sky and prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so immense a domain to be alone in.
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A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer's job is to be its medium.
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That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
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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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'But now you've come too far, and I warn you, woman! I will not have you set foot on this domain. And if you cross my will or dare so much as speak to me again, I will have you driven from Re Albi, and off the Overfell, with the dogs at your heels. Have you understood me?''No,' Tenar said, 'I have never understood men like you.'
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Nobody had made this wilderness, and there was no evil in it and no good; it simply was.
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It seemed, at least, that they had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
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'Why must there be war?' 'Oh Lavinia, what a woman's question that is! Because men are men.'
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'Well,' he said. 'Strange roads have strange guides. Let’s go on.'
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She had come to Aka to learn how to sing this world's tune, to dance its dance; and at last, she thought, away from the city's endless noise, she was beginning to hear the music and to learn how to move to it.
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It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.
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And I know that all I understand about living is having your work to do, and being able to do it. That’s the pleasure, and the glory, and all. And if you can’t do the work, or it’s taken from you, then what’s any good? You have to have something....
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What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
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'The solution lies in secrecy,' said Medra. 'But so does the problem.'
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Hughes, who had entered the space program from astrophysics, came with a very good record, in fact a brilliant one. This troubled many of his military superiors, to whom high intelligence was a code word for instability and insubordination.
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The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.
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I forgot, being too interested myself, that he’s a king, and does not see things rationally, but as a king.