Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Highdrake said that to make love is to unmake power.
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They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!
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The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.
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Ignorant power is a bane!
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Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we knew it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we did not know.
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A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist can’t hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.
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You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, "Am I popular?" I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.
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Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.
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They prevented men from doing anything. But they did nothing themselves. They did not rule, they only blighted.
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'Is it different, then, for men and for women?''What isn’t, dearie?'
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I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
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What would that be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality.
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After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory.
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Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
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Easy victories aren’t worth winning.
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All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that’s the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it’s life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?
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Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.
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The news had stirred him strangely. He listened for bulletins on the radio, which he had seldom turned on after finding that its basic function was advertising things for sale.
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How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn’t saved, isn’t taught?
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Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.
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And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?
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Those were men in whom great strength and knowledge served the will to evil and fed upon it. Whether the wizardry that serves a better end may always prove the stronger, we do not know. We hope.
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Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.