Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both.
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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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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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Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger.
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Manipulated, one manipulates others.
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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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Statesmen remember things selectively.
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If they come prying they can leave curious.
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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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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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Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
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Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.
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Highdrake said that to make love is to unmake power.
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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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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'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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'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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Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.
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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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'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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'Aye. Like knows like, sister'
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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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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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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.