Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.
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There are dance artists, painting artists and writing artists. Authors are writing artists. You can practice art in whatever medium you choose, and words are mine.
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Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.
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We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything, Anarchism, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
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When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
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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 law of evolution is that the strongest survives.''Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical.'
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I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.
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If they come prying they can leave curious.
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We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God’s truth, the universe at once began to exist.
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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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The First Envoy to a world always comes alone. One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.
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'There’s nothing to fear, Lebannen,' he said gently, mockingly. 'They were only the dead.'
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But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.
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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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Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.
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You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.
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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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'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?'
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It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
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Statesmen remember things selectively.
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Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
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We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.