Ursula K Le Guin Quotes - Page 3

When we know that it's a planet just like this one, only with a better climate and worse people--when we know they're all propertarians, and fight wars, and make laws, and eat while other starve, and anyhow are all getting older and having bad luck and getting rheumatic knees and corns on their toes just like people there...when we know all that, why does it still look so happy--as if life there must be happy?..."... "If you can see the whole thing," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives....But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the art is, is to see it as the moon. They way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
Ursula K Le Guin
Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.
Ursula K Le Guin
I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?
Ursula K Le Guin
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
Ursula K Le Guin
A book won't move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. A book won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a good novel well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is a collaboration, an act of participation. No wonder not everybody is up to it.
Ursula K Le Guin
a book is a box of words until you open it.
Ursula K Le Guin
A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
Ursula K Le Guin
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.
Ursula K Le Guin
But the human being likes to be challenged, seeks freedom in adversity.
Ursula K Le Guin
There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
Ursula K Le Guin
Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. {...} But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.
Ursula K Le Guin
It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
Ursula K Le Guin
A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government in earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
Ursula K Le Guin
Well," he said slowly, "sometimes there's a passion that comes in its springtime to ill fate or death. And because it ends in its beauty, it's what the harpers sing of and the poets make stories of: the love that escapes the years...."All or nothing, 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?
Ursula K Le Guin
Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.
Ursula K Le Guin
He seemed not to know the uses of silence.
Ursula K Le Guin
I think we shall have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round and round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either.
Ursula K Le Guin
[T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
Ursula K Le Guin
The unknown...the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought...The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K Le Guin
Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd.
Ursula K Le Guin
They let us be, here, in the cage of our ignorance.
Ursula K Le Guin
But if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of the job to be done and one's ability to do it, then you might say the chief virtue of excellent artists is their modesty...But knowing your limits and going to them isn't arrogance. It's greatness of spirit.
Ursula K Le Guin
So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom...
Ursula K Le Guin
At the pit's bottom is no anger.
Ursula K Le Guin
Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
Ursula K Le Guin
A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras.
Ursula K Le Guin
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
Ursula K Le Guin
Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name’s the motherof the ten thousand things.
Ursula K Le Guin
There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.
Ursula K Le Guin
Through him speaks a shrewd and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom a profound, old, terrible, and unimaginably various experience of life. But he himself is young: impatient, inexperienced. He stands higher than we stand, seeing wider, but he is himself only the height of a man.
Ursula K Le Guin
BucketI feel so dreamydreamy lazy, crazy sleepylike I want to be therein the doorway, the doorwayor the porch cornerbe sitting, be emptynotdoing not goingan old bucket left therein the porch corner is like I aman old empty bucket somebody left there.
Ursula K Le Guin
To the Bullock RoserootWhat's the thought you thinkall your life long?It must be a great one,a solemn one, to make you gazethrough the world at it,all your life long.When you have to look aside from ityour eyes roll, you bellowin anger, anxiousto return to it, steadilyto gaze at it, think itall your life long.
Ursula K Le Guin
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
Ursula K Le Guin
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
Ursula K Le Guin
On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate.
Ursula K Le Guin
If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even.
Ursula K Le Guin
The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future - indeed Schrödinger most famous thought experiment goes to show that the "future," on the quantum level, cannot be predicted - but to describe reality, the present world.Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore mor honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore mor honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
Ursula K Le Guin
He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.
Ursula K Le Guin
To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game...speak the truth and hear the truth.
Ursula K Le Guin
Was he leaving home, or going home?
Ursula K Le Guin
Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things, there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them, too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there are seeds to be gathered and room in the bag of stars.
Ursula K Le Guin
All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world.
Ursula K Le Guin
I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading." -- "On Despising Genres," essay
Ursula K Le Guin
To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.
Ursula K Le Guin
None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm, that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.
Ursula K Le Guin
[H.G. Wells said] that his method was "to trick his reader into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds." Such prestidigitation is a characteristic ploy of science fiction: to make a nonexistent entity or impossible premise acceptable (often by scientific-sounding terms such as telepathy, extraterrestrial, cavorite, FTL speed) and then follow through with a genuinely realistic, logically coherent description of the effects and implica
Ursula K Le Guin
The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite—sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women.
Ursula K Le Guin
Fish and visitors stink after three days.
Ursula K Le Guin
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Ursula K Le Guin
They are of the dream time. I don't understand it, I can't say it in words. Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes. . . .But when the mind becomes conscious, when the rate of evolution speeds up, then you have to be careful. Careful of the world. You must learn the way. You must learn the skills, the art, the limits. A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully--as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously. Do you see? Does it mean anything to you?
Ursula K Le Guin
On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place.
Ursula K Le Guin
In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.
Ursula K Le Guin
What is evil?" asked the younger man. The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them both. "A web we men weave." Ged answered.
Ursula K Le Guin
Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. —Chuang Tse: XXIII
Ursula K Le Guin
Not even need and love can defeat fate...
Ursula K Le Guin
I am tired of safe places, and roofs, and walls around me.
Ursula K Le Guin
Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won't talk about anything except the injustice of the United States income tax structure toward people with fluctuating income, or how to breed Black Angus cows, or something.
Ursula K Le Guin
Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had.
Ursula K Le Guin
I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.
Ursula K Le Guin
All her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars.
Ursula K Le Guin