Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Highdrake said that to make love is to unmake power.
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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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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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What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
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What is a woman's power then?" she asked. "I don't think we know." "When has a woman power because she's a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while..." "In her house, maybe." She looked around the kitchen. "But the doors are shut," she said, "the doors are locked." "Because you're valuable." "Oh yes. We're precious. So long as we're powerless.
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Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.
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Maybe that’s what the Masters are afraid of. Maybe celibacy isn’t as necessary as the Rule of Roke teaches. Maybe it’s not a way of keeping the power pure, but of keeping the power to themselves.
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'Well,' he said. 'Strange roads have strange guides. Let’s go on.'
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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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'Aye. Like knows like, sister'
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There’s no way to use power for good.
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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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I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
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If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.
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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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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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I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
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'The first lesson on Roke, and the last is, Do what is needful! And no more.''The lessons in between, then, must consist in learning what is needful.''They do.'
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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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If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
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She saw time naively as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.
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All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
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They say Mars absolves the warrior from the crimes of war, but those who were not the warriors, those for whom the war was said to be fought, even though they never wanted it to be fought, who absolves them?
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No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty.