Discover a wealth of wisdom and insight from Ursula K. Le Guin through their most impactful and thought-provoking quotes and sayings. Expand your perspective with their inspiring words and share these beautiful Ursula K. Le Guin quote pictures with your friends and followers on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blog - all free of charge. We've compiled the top 1150 Ursula K. Le Guin quotes for you to explore and share with others.

The word he used was not "wallowing," there being no animals on Anarres to make wallows; it was a compound, meaning literally "coating continually and thickly with excrement." The flexibility and precision of Pravic lent itself to the creation of vivid metaphors quite unforeseen by its inventors. By Ursula K. Le Guin Wallowing Anarres Wallows Compound Meaning

He welcomed isolation with all his heart. It never occurred to him that the reserve he met in Bedap and Tirin might be a response; that his gentle but already formidable hermetic character might form its own ambiance, which only great strength, or great devotion, could withstand. All he noticed, really, was that he had plenty of time to work at last. By Ursula K. Le Guin Heart Welcomed Isolation Great Bedap

But the human being likes to be challenged, seeks freedom in adversity. By Ursula K. Le Guin Challenged Seeks Adversity Human Freedom

I think what you mostly do when you find you really are alone is to panic. You rush to the opposite extreme and pack yourself into groups - clubs, teams, societies, types. You suddenly start dressing exactly like the others. It's a way of being invisible. The way you sew the patches on the holes in your blue jeans becomes incredibly important. If you do it wrong you're not with it. That's a peculiar phrase, you know? With it. With what? With them. With the others. All together. Safety in numbers. I'm not me. I'm a basketball letter. I'm a popular kid. I'm my friend's friend. I'm a black leather growth on a Honda. I'm a member. I'm a teenager. You can't see me, all you can see is us. We're safe. And if We see You standing alone by yourself, if you're lucky we'll ignore you. If you're not lucky, we might throw rocks. Because we don't like people standing there with the wrong kind of patches on their jeans reminding us that we're each alone and none of us is safe. By Ursula K. Le Guin Panic Find Patches Safe Jeans

Nothing in the world has tentacles or fins or paws or claws. Nothing in the world soars. Nothing swims. Nothing purrs, barks, growls, roars, chitters, trills, or cries repeatedly two notes, a descending fourth, for three months of the year. There are no months of the year. There is no moon. There is no year. By Ursula K. Le Guin Year World Claws Tentacles Fins

He knew that he was very near achieving the General Temporal Theory that the Ioti wanted so badly for their spaceflight and their prestige. He knew also that he had not achieved it and might never do so. He had never admitted either fact clearly to anyone. Before he left Anarres, he had thought the thing was in his grasp. ... He wasn't quite sure he was ready to publish. There was something not quite right, something that needed a little refining. As he had been working ten years on the theory, it wouldn't hurt to take a little longer, to get it polished perfectly smooth. The little something not quite right kept looking wronger. A little flaw in the reasoning. A big flaw. A crack right through the foundations...The night before he left Anarres he had burned every paper he had on the General Theory. He had come to Urras with nothing. For half a year he had, in their terms, been bluffing them. Or had he been bluffing himself? By Ursula K. Le Guin Temporal Ioti Knew Theory Prestige

On the blank leaf glued to the inner back cover I drew the double curve within the circle, and blacked the yin half of the symbol, then pushed it back to my companion. 'Do you know that sign?' He looked at it a long time with a strange look, but he said, 'No.' 'It's found on Earth, and on Hain-Davenant, and on Chiffewar. It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.' By Ursula K. Le Guin Back Circle Symbol Companion Blank

The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society formed upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. By Ursula K. Le Guin Rule Acts Responsible Duty Individual

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? By Ursula K. Le Guin Slowly Death Passion Springtime Ill

I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free. By Ursula K. Le Guin Told Story Asked Thing Door

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal. By Ursula K. Le Guin Text Endurance Dream Rites Read

Why is it that if you say you don't enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren't going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as "loathing" it?The little Time article itself is fairly accurate about what I've said about e-reading, but the title of the series, "Famous Writers Who Loathe E-Books," reflects or caters to a silly idea: that not being interested in using a particular technology is the same as hating and despising it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Technology Famous Loathing Time Writers

A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out. Everyone rushed after it, shouting "Stop! Stop! Why did you do that?" "Becuase I am a panda," said the panda. "That's what pandas do. If you don't believe me, look in the dictionary." So they looked in the dictionary and sure enough they found Panda: Racoon-like animal of Asia. Eats shoots and leaves. By Ursula K. Le Guin Stop Panda Walks Tea Room

What are we so afraid of? Why don't we let 'em tell us we're afraid? What is it they're afraid of?" She picked up the stocking she had been darning, turned it in her hands, was silent awhile; finally she said, "What are they afraid of us for? By Ursula K. Le Guin Afraid Darning Turned Hands Awhile

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give. By Ursula K. Le Guin Suffering Brings Hand Love Brothers

Are all the scientists here men, then?" "Scientists?" Oiie asked, incredulous. Pae coughed. "Scientists. Oh, yes, certainly, they're all men. There are some female teachers in the girls' schools, of course. But they never get past Certificate level." "Why not?" "Can't do the math; no head for abstract thought; don't belong. You know how it is, what women call thinking is done with the uterus! Of course, there's always a few exceptions, God-awful brainy women with vaginal atrophy." "You Odonians let women study science?" Oiie inquired. "Well, they are in the sciences, yes." "Not many, I hope." "Well, about half. By Ursula K. Le Guin Scientists Men Women Oiie Incredulous

It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name. By Ursula K. Le Guin Secret Power Stars Water End

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Woman Power Asked Know Doors

You're trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn't suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams? By Ursula K. Le Guin Progressive Job Humanitarian Reach Goals

War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to "a war against" whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the "right" side and therefore will win. Right makes might. By Ursula K. Le Guin Limiting War Moral Limited Dangerous

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 ... There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness. By Ursula K. Le Guin Strongest Survives Law Evolution Social

His efforts to break out of his essential seclusion were, in fact, a failure, and he knew it. He made no close friend. He copulated with a number of girls, but copulation was not the joy it ought to be. It was a mere relief of need, and he felt ashamed of it afterward because it involved another person as object. Masturbation was preferable, the suitable course for a man like himself. Solitude was his fate; he was trapped by his heredity. She [his mother] had said it: "The work comes first." Rulag had said it calmly, stating fact, powerless to change it, to break out of her cold cell. So it was with him. His heart yearned towards them, the kindly young souls who called him brother, but he could not reach them, nor they him. He was born to be alone, a damned cold intellectual, an egoist.The work came first, but it went nowhere. Like sex, it ought to have been a pleasure, and it wasn't. By Ursula K. Le Guin Failure Efforts Essential Seclusion Knew

Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd. By Ursula K. Le Guin Ignorance Savagely Illiteracy Knew Shrewd

Though Argaven might be neither sane nor shrewd, he had had long practice in the evasions and challenges and rhetorical subtleties used in conversation by those whose main aim in life was the achievement and maintenance of the shifgrethor relationship on a high level. By Ursula K. Le Guin Argaven Shrewd Level Sane Long

He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell. By Ursula K. Le Guin Interest Politician Hard Shrewd Jovial

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Terrible People Profound Life Speaks

Do remember, though, that unless you're a playwright, the result [dialogue] isn't what you want; it's only an element of what you want. Actors embody and re-create the words of drama. In fiction, a tremendous amount of story and character may be given through the dialogue, but the story-world and its people have to be created by the storyteller. If there's nothing in it but disembodied voices, too much is missing. By Ursula K. Le Guin Remember Playwright Result Dialogue Element

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.From "A Left-Handed Commencement Address," Mills College 1983 By Ursula K. Le Guin Meet Find Failure Place Human

The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you? By Ursula K. Le Guin Dragon Question Talk Eat

I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain ploughland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country, is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession ... By Ursula K. Le Guin Giving Hills Farms Love People

A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't "get into" me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them namesMars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the storm cloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren't people. They don't love and hate, they aren't for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live. By Ursula K. Le Guin Juno Genius Power Woman Sacred

It might derail and we'll all be killed. And if we do come to Aisnar? What's Aisnar? Mere hearsay.- - "That's morbid," Kasimir said, glimpsing again the walls collapsing.- - "No, exhilarating," his friend answered. "Takes a lot of work to hold the world together, when you look at it that way. But it's worthwhile. Building up cities, holding up the roofs by an act of fidelity. Not faith. Fidelity. By Ursula K. Le Guin Aisnar Killed Derail Fidelity Kasimir

Of course, the books you read early, before 20, and love passionately, they get to you. Even if later on you can't read them again. You were shaped by certain books. All of us that read a lot, we're partly book-manufactured. It's really hard to talk about the influence of such books on you because it goes so deep. It's like, what was your father's influence on you, what was your mother's influence. How can you say? You grew up with it. So, you will find I dodge all questions about favorite books and so on. What does it matter what I like? By Ursula K. Le Guin Read Books Early Passionately Influence

Gvarab was old enough that she often wandered and maundered. Attendance at her lectures was small and uneven. She soon picked out the thin boy with big ears as her one constant auditor. She began to lecture for him. The light, steady, intelligent eyes met hers, steadied her, woke her, she flashed to brilliance, regained the vision lost. She soared, and the other students in the room looked up confused or startled, even scared if they had the wits to be scared. Gvarab saw a much larger universe than most people were capable of seeing, and it made them blink. The light-eyed boy watched her steadily. In his face she saw her joy. What she offered, what she had offered for a whole lifetime, what no one had ever shared with her, he shared. He was her brother, across the gulf of fifty years, and her redemption. By Ursula K. Le Guin Maundered Wandered Gvarab Boy Scared

Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind's reach and made a whole again. He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, waisted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Years Back Night Seventeen Bitter

After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male. By Ursula K. Le Guin Earthsea Write Man Tradition Questioning

Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted him, was the only Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me personally and given met entire personal loyalty: and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man. By Ursula K. Le Guin Give Refused Reality Rejected Gethen

Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to "get away to"?Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane stove, five aluminum folding chairs, and a transistor radio on the inside. They arrive totally encapsulated in a secondhand reality. And then they move on to Yellowstone, and it's just the same there, all trailers and transistors. They go from park to park, but they never really go anywhere; except when one of them who thinks that even the wildlife isn't real gets chewed up by a genuine, firsthand bear.The same sort of thing seems to be happening to Elfland, lately. By Ursula K. Le Guin Place Private Park Elfland Foot

I know that I am going to meet a personal variation on reality; a partial view of reality. But I know also that by that partiality, that distancing from the shared experience, it will be new: a revelation. It will be a vision, a more or less powerful or haunting dream. A space-voyage through somebody else's psychic abysses. It will fall short of tragedy, because tragedy is the truth, and truth is what the very great artists, the absolute novelists, tell. It will not be truth; but it will be imagination. Truth is best. For it encompasses tragedy and partakes of the eternal joy. But very few of us know it; the best we can do is recognize it. Imagination - to me - is the next best. For it partakes of Creation, which is one aspect of the eternal joy. All the rest is either Politics or Pedantry, or Mainstream Fiction, may it rest in peace. By Ursula K. Le Guin Reality Truth Tragedy Meet Personal

He stopped and after a while went on. 'Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices muct be made. When I was young I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt to the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, blinds 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. Or wonder who, after all, you are.' How could such a man, thought Arren, be in doubt as towho and what he is? He had believed such doubts were reserved for the young, who had not done anything yet. By Ursula K. Le Guin Act Arren Stopped Choose Life

I do not say that artists cannot be seers, inspired: that the awen cannot come upon them, and the god speak through them. Who would be an artist if they did not believe that that happens? if they did not know it happens, because they have felt the god within them use their tongue, their hands? Maybe only once, once in their lives. But once is enough. By Ursula K. Le Guin Inspired Seers God Awen Speak

There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just don't understand. And incomprehension is boredom. By Ursula K. Le Guin Creativity Sin Words Firewall Mind

This story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed, I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story. By Ursula K. Le Guin Story Mine Told Judge Voice

Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god? By Ursula K. Le Guin Hearts Set Fire Make Fierce

But when we crave power over life - endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality - then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale. By Ursula K. Le Guin Immortality Greed Life Endless Wealth

Who am I? Laia muttered to her invisible audience, and they knew the answer and told it to her with one voice. She was the little girl with scabby knees, sitting on the doorstep staring down through the dirty golden haze of River Street in the heat of late summer, the six-year-old, the sixteen-year-old, the fierce, cross, dream-ridden girl, untouched, untouchable. She was herself By Ursula K. Le Guin Girl River Street Laia Audience

She did feel it. A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free. What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveller may never reach the end of it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Feel Cried Choice Heart Dark

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Meet Sea Wished Land Dry

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. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid. By Ursula K. Le Guin Words True Book Written Numbers

It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow. By Ursula K. Le Guin Yang Light Yin Darkness Dark

My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I By Ursula K. Le Guin Socially Politically Correct Counts Motivated

A voice in the darkness said, 'You have come too far.' Arren answered it, saying, 'Only too far is far enough. By Ursula K. Le Guin Voice Darkness Arren Answered

O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then. By Ursula K. Le Guin Writer Foolish Dreamtime Moves Storytime

When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast ... The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say. By Ursula K. Le Guin Fast Mind Runs Circle Hands

[T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies. By Ursula K. Le Guin Hey Taught Boy Lie Lies

What's wrong with pleasure, Takver? why don't you want it?""Nothing's wrong with it. And I do want it. Only I don't need it. And if I take what I don't need, I'll never get to what I do need. By Ursula K. Le Guin Takver Wrong Pleasure

I went to the springs while the sun was still up, and sitting on a rocky outcrop above the cave mouth I watched the light grow reddish across the misty pools, and listened to the troubled voice of the water. After a while I moved farther up the hill, where I could hear birds singing near and far in the silence of the trees. The presence of the trees was very strong ... The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion. By Ursula K. Le Guin Pools Water Springs Sun Sitting

You have great power inborn in you, and you used that power wrongly, to work a spell over which you had no control, not knowing how that spell affects the balance of light and dark, life and death, good and evil. And you were moved to do this by pride and by hate. Is it any wonder the result was ruin? You summoned a spirit from the dead, but with it came one of the Powers of unlife. Uncalled it came from a place where there are no names. Evil, it wills to work evil through you. The power you had to call it gives it power over you: you are connected. It is the shadow of your arrogance, the shadow of your ignorance, the shadow you cast. Has a shadow a name? By Ursula K. Le Guin Spell Power Shadow Evil Wrongly

The Gethenians do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imaginations to accept. After all, what is the first question we ask about a newborn baby? ... there is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protected/ protective. One is respected and judged only as a human being. You cannot cast a Gethnian in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards 'him' a corresponding role dependant on your expetations of the interactions between persons of the same or oppositve sex. It is an appalling experience for a Terran By Ursula K. Le Guin Gethenians Women Men Role Accept

They say one gets used to being a millionaire; so after a year or two a human being begins to get used to being a woman. By Ursula K. Le Guin Millionaire Woman Year Human Begins

What's wrong with men?" Tenar inquired cautiously.As cautiously, lowering her voice, Moss replied, "I don't know, my dearie. I've thought on it. Often I've thought on it. The best I can say it is like this. A man's in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell." She held up her long, bent, wet fingers as if holding a walnut. "It's hard and strong, that shell, and it's all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that's all. That's all there is. It's all him and nothing else, inside. By Ursula K. Le Guin Men Wrong Moss Thought Shell

SEEN ACROSS TEN MILES OF sunlit water, Lorbanery was green, green as the bright moss by a fountain's rim. Nearby, it broke up into leaves, and tree-trunks, and shadows, and roads, and houses, and the faces and clothing of people, and dust, and all that goes to make up an island inhabited by men. Yet still, over all, it was green: for every acre of it that was not built or walked upon was given up to the low, round-topped hurbah trees, on the leaves of which feed the little worms that spin the silk that is made into thread and woven by the men and women and children of Lorbanery. At dusk the air there is full of small grey bats who feed on the little worms. They eat many, but are suffered to do so and are not killed by the silk-weavers, who indeed account it a deed of very evil omen to kill the grey-winged bats. For if human beings live off the worms, they say, surely small bats have the right to do so. By Ursula K. Le Guin Ten Miles Green Lorbanery Worms

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. By Ursula K. Le Guin Fantasy Antirational Pararational Surrealistic Reality

Indeed it can be seen as our human essence, how few behavioral imperatives we follow. How flexible we are in finding new things to do, new ways to go. How ingeniously, inventively, desperately we seek the right way, the true way, the Way we believe we lost long ago among the thickets of novelty and opportunity and choice... By Ursula K. Le Guin Essence Follow Human Behavioral Imperatives

All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like - what's going on - what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies. "The truth against the world!" - Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Listen Today Rain Sunlight Weather

Our souls are old,often used before.The knife outlaststhe hand that holds it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Souls Oldoften Beforethe Knife Outlaststhe

Please bring strange things.Please come bringing new things.Let very old things come into your hands.Let what you do not know come into your eyes.Let desert sand harden your feet.Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.Let the paths of your fingertips be your mapsAnd the ways you go be the lines of your palms.Let there be deep snow in your inbreathingAnd your outbreath be the shining of ice.May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.May your soul be at home where there are no houses.Walk carefully, well-loved one,Walk mindfully, well-loved one,Walk fearlessly, well-loved one.Return with us, return to us,Be always coming home.Ursula K. Leguin By Ursula K. Le Guin Wellloved Onewalk Strange Leguin Carefully

His story told of the king's daughter Cassandra, who foresaw what would happen and tried to prevent the Trojans from letting the great horse into the city, but no one would listen to her: it was a curse laid on her, to see the truth and say it and not be heard. It is a curse laid on women more often than on men. Men want the truth to be theirs, their discovery and property. By Ursula K. Le Guin Cassandra Trojans Curse Laid City

If you want to see what my Earthsea looks like, you could sail past the Scilly Isles (handy for you Brits); or you could go to a little bay called Trinidad on the far north coast of California on a foggy morning (not so handy for you Brits). But these are both places I saw long after I had mapped and travelled in the Archipelago. It was pleasant to be able to say - ah! yes! that looks just like the West Reach! By Ursula K. Le Guin Brits Isles Handy Earthsea Scilly

And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all. By Ursula K. Le Guin Rock Needed Fog Solid Hold

The question was where to start. Where to build up a solid foundation of knowledge on which you could balance ideas. It wasn't exactly a modest ambition. But what I had learned from Natalie was that you could have a very immodest ambition if you went after it methodically. By Ursula K. Le Guin Start Question Ambition Ideas Natalie

But I can't say that gratitude was my motive for infringing on the Law of Cultural Embargo. I was not paying my debt to him. Such debts remain owing. Estraven and I had simply arrived at the point where we shared whatever we had that was worth sharing. By Ursula K. Le Guin Embargo Law Cultural Gratitude Motive

Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will. By Ursula K. Le Guin Currentborne Waveflung Tugged Abyss Jellyfish

The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind. By Ursula K. Le Guin Mind Constrained Body Freedom

Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I went on through the Sinoth Valley, through the evening of his death, into the cold country that lies beyond fear. There I found you can weep all you like, but there's no good in it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Estraven Gobrin Ice Cry Fear

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.(Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading, Harper's Magazine, February 2008) By Ursula K. Le Guin Compact Artifact Efficient Device Handle

The best I can say, it's like this. A man's in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell ... It's hard and strong, that shell, and it's all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that's all. That's all there is.A woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark ... I go back into the dark! Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman's power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who'll ask the dark its name? By Ursula K. Le Guin Woman Deeper Roots Dark Older

Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors besides battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fanstasy is good at thinking about those other ways. By Ursula K. Le Guin Fantasy Evil Literature Embodying Examining

But I liked the writing better. I could make it look beautiful. I could keep it. The spoken words just went out like the wind, and you always had to say them all over again to keep them alive. But the writing stayed, and you could learn to make it better. More beautiful. By Ursula K. Le Guin Beautiful Writing Make Wind Alive

Scientific truth will out, you can't hide the sun under a stone. By Ursula K. Le Guin Scientific Stone Truth Hide Sun

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Truth Scientist Pretend Work Impersonal

What good seeking the safe course, on a journey such as this? There are senseless courses, which I shall not take; but there is no safe one. Streth By Ursula K. Le Guin Safe Good Seeking Journey Streth

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 By Ursula K. Le Guin Heaven Call Sons Xxiii Reason

One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness ... Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both. By Ursula K. Le Guin Civilization Primitiveness Artificial Unnatural Dangerous

It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint, or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness. . . Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both. It By Ursula K. Le Guin Ubiquitous Durable Specious Metaphor Paint

We didn't talk about problems, or parents, or automobiles, or ambitions. We talked about life ... And the sea was there, forty feet away and getting closer, and the sky over the sea, and the sun going down the sky. And it was cold, and it was the high point of my life. I'd had high points before.Once at night walking in the park in the rain in autumn.Once out in the desert, under the stars, when I turned into the earth turning on its axis. Sometimes thinking, just thinking things through.But always alone. By myself.This time I was not alone. I was on the high mountain with a friend. There is nothing, there is nothing that beats that. If it never happens again in my life, still I can say I was there once. By Ursula K. Le Guin Life High Problems Parents Automobiles

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like what's going on what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming another third of it spent in telling lies. [Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness] By Ursula K. Le Guin Business Clairvoyants Prediction Prophets Futurologists

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive ... Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying ... Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies. By Ursula K. Le Guin Business Science Predictive Descriptive Listen

Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew. By Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Burn Launching Beautiful Watching

If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwinthe size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking. By Ursula K. Le Guin Charles Darwinthe Hero Mind Seeking

Science fiction - and the correct shortcut is 'sf' - uses actual scientific facts or theories for the source ideas or framework of the story. It has some scientific content, however speculative. If it breaks a law of physics, it knows it's doing so and follows up the consequences. If it invents a society of aliens, it does so with some respect for and knowledge of the social sciences and what you might call social probabilities. And some of it is literarily self-aware enough to treat its metaphors as metaphors. By Ursula K. Le Guin Scientific Fiction Story Correct Shortcut

This was a great magic. Festin had no more performed it than has any man who in exile or danger longs for the earth and waters of his home, seeing and yearning over the doorsill of his house, the table where he has eaten, the branches outside the window of the room where he has slept. Only in dreams do any but the great Mages realize this magic of going home. By Ursula K. Le Guin Home Great Magic Mages Festin

Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing. By Ursula K. Le Guin Wealth Status Pride Ruin Good

I know who you are," she said. "You're my enemy. The true believer. The righteous man with the righteous mission. The one that jails people for reading and burns the books. That persecutes people who do exercises the wrong way. That dumps out the medicine and pisses on it. That pushes the button that sends the drones to drop the bombs. And hides behind a bunker and doesn't get hurt. Shielded by God. Or the state. Or whatever lie he uses to hide his envy and self-interest and cowardice and lust for power. It took me a while to see you, though. You saw me right away. You knew I was your enemy. Was unrighteous. How did you know it? By Ursula K. Le Guin Righteous Enemy People God Believer

I never know the heron as it flies at first. What is the slow, wide-winged figure in the sky? Then I see it, like a word in a foreign language, like seeing one's own name written in a strange alphabet and recognizing it, I say it: the heron. By Ursula K. Le Guin Heron Flies Slow Widewinged Sky

And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting thisletting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapablebut then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. By Ursula K. Le Guin Write Books Art Producers Accepting

The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes. By Ursula K. Le Guin Earth Beautiful Bright Kindly Terrible

He was one whose power was akin to, and as strong as, the Old Powers of the earth; one who talked with dragons, and held off earthquakes with his word. And there he lay asleep on the dirt, with a little thistle growing by his hand. It was very strange. Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed. The glory of the sky touched his dusty hair, and turned the thistle gold for a little while. By Ursula K. Le Guin Power Powers Earth Dragons Word

I am yours by parentage and custom and by duty undertaken towards you. I am your wizard. But it is time you recalled that, tough I am a servant, I am not your servant. By Ursula K. Le Guin Parentage Custom Duty Undertaken Servant

Chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don't see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can't make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly. By Ursula K. Le Guin Chronosophy Ethics Make Time Difference

And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life By Ursula K. Le Guin Suffering Change Speak Spiritual Talent

Was he leaving home, or going home? By Ursula K. Le Guin Home Leaving

There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. By Ursula K. Le Guin Loss Power Profit Enter Fear

In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it ... To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become iteverything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not interactive with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everyone is up to it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Book Mind Silence Challenge Room

The interplay of the aesthetic with the erotic is complex. The peacock's tail is beautiful to us, sexy to the peahen. Beauty and sexual attractiveness overlap, coincide. They may be deeply related. I think they should not be confused. By Ursula K. Le Guin Complex Interplay Aesthetic Erotic Sexy

We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand outside things and run them that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be. By Ursula K. Le Guin Work World Stand Things Run

COME HOME, TENAR! COME HOME!"In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face toward home. The mother waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind her, watched the tiny figure running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass beneath the trees. By Ursula K. Le Guin Home Tenar Trees Grass Running

I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises. By Ursula K. Le Guin Writing Time Riskier Asimov Science

He saw time turn back upon itself, a river flowing upward to the spring. He held the contemporaneity of two moments in his left and right hands; as he moved them apart he smiled to see the moments separate like dividing soap bubbles. By Ursula K. Le Guin Spring Time Turn Back River

The body is an arrangement in spacetime, a patterning, a process; the mind is a process of the body, an organ, doing what organs do: organize. Order, pattern, connect ... an immensely flexible technology, or life strategy, which if used with skill and resourcefulness presents each of us with that most fascinating of all serials, The Story of My Life. By Ursula K. Le Guin Body Process Organize Spacetime Patterning

Realism is for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and convention subject matter. Re-Fi is a repetitive genre written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had any self-respect they'd be writing memoir, but they're too lazy to fact-check. Of course I never read Re-Fi. But the kids keep bringing home these garish realistic novels and talking about them, so I know that it's an incredibly narrow genre, completely centered on one species, full of worn-out cliches and predictable situations--the quest for the father, mother-bashing, obsessive male lust, dysfunctional suburban families, etc., etc. All it's good for is being made into mass-market movies. Given its old-fashioned means and limited subject matter, realism is quite incapable of describing the complexity of contemporary experience. By Ursula K. Le Guin Lazyminded Semieducated Realism Matter People

With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice - the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind. By Ursula K. Le Guin Individual State Society Clear Power

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Modesty Selfeffacingness Nonoverweening Interpreted Diffidence

What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History. By Ursula K. Le Guin Moment Describe Flowing River History

He laid his hands on her head, pushing back the hood. He began to speak. His voice was soft, and the words were in no tongue she had ever heard. The sound of them came into her heart like rain falling. She grew still to listen. By Ursula K. Le Guin Head Pushing Hood Laid Hands

He was never rash or hurried, but he was always read. It was the secret, no doubt, of the extraordinary political career he threw away for my sake; it was also the explanation of his belief in me and devotion to my mission. When I came, he was ready. Nobody else on Winter was. By Ursula K. Le Guin Hurried Read Rash Secret Doubt

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Drafts Hot World Common Table

The Sun Going SouthIn late sunshine I wander troubled.Restless I wander in autumn sunlight.Too many changes, partings, and deaths.Doors have closed that were always open.Trees that held the sky up are cut down.So much that I alone remember!This creek runs dry among its stones.Souls of the dead, come drink this water!Come into this side valley with me,a restless old woman, unseemly,troubled, walking on dry grass, dry stones. By Ursula K. Le Guin Partings Unseemlytroubled Wander Sun Dry

Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal, The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Shevek Fulfillment Time Landscape Thought

[Arren] was proud of his lineage, but thought of himself as an heir of princes, one of the House of Enlad. Morred, from whom that house descended, had been dead two thousand years. His deeds were matter of legends, not of this present world. It was as if the Archmage had named him son of myth, inheritor of dreams. By Ursula K. Le Guin Arren Enlad House Lineage Princes

Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes. I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own. By Ursula K. Le Guin Winter Eyes Years People Planet

Light is a power. A great power, by which we exist, but which exists beyond our needs, in itself. Sunlight and starlight are time, and time is light. In the sunlight, in the days and years, life is. In a dark place life may call upon the light, naming it. But usually when you see a wizard name or call upon some thing, some object to appear, that is not the same, he calls upon no power greater than himself, and what appears is an illusion only. To summon a thing that is not there at all, to call it by speaking its true name, that is a great mastery, not lightly used. Not for mere hunger's sake. Yarrow, your little dragon has stolen a cake. By Ursula K. Le Guin Power Light Call Great Time

How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession ... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope. By Ursula K. Le Guin Love Hate Hills Country Giving

If you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you're writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn't flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work. By Ursula K. Le Guin Writing Problem Devices Coax Stay

If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life. By Ursula K. Le Guin Experience Mob Foreman Bossing Members

And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. By Ursula K. Le Guin Poetry Beauty Ornament Meaning Truth

As a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness. You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities. Nobody else in the world can do it, or ever could do it, or ever will be able to do it again. By Ursula K. Le Guin Free Writer Country Make Freest

It was not in Raj Lyubov's nature to think, "What can I do?" Character and training disposed him not to interfere in other men's business. His job was to find out what they did, and his inclination was to let them go on doing it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Raj Lyubov Nature Character Business

You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?" "No - " "To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question." I By Ursula K. Le Guin Genry Foretelling Perfected Practice Question

He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps. By Ursula K. Le Guin Spoke Bitterness Matter Awful Things

I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever. By Ursula K. Le Guin Moral Guidance Action Lot Reading

He thought of death, in that gap between the beginning of a step and its completion, and at the end of the step he stood on a new earth. By Ursula K. Le Guin Step Death Completion Earth Thought

Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls. By Ursula K. Le Guin Country Roots Earth Dark Human

A wizard's power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow ... By Ursula K. Le Guin Changing Summoning World Power Wizard

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 carefullyas the rock is part of the whole unconsciously. Do you see? Does it mean anything to you? By Ursula K. Le Guin Time Dreams Learn Careful Mind

You are beautiful," Tenar said in a different tone. "Listen to me, Therru. Come here. You have scars, ugly scars, because an ugly, evil thing was done to you. People see the scars. But they see you, too, and you aren't the scars. You aren't ugly. You aren't evil. You are Therru, and beautiful. You are Therru who can work, and walk, and run, and dance, beautifully, in a red dress. By Ursula K. Le Guin Tenar Scars Therru Tone Ugly

A friend. What is a friend, in a world where any friend may be a lover at a new phase of the moon? Not I, locked in my virility: no friend to Therem Harth, or any other of his race. Neither man nor woman, neither and both, cyclic, lunar, metamorphosing under the hand's touch, changelings in the human cradle, they were no flesh of mine, no friends; no love between us. By Ursula K. Le Guin Friend Harth Therem Moon Cyclic

I'm a lazy man. With lazy dreams. I need Tai to wake me up, make me vibrate, irritate me. I need my angry woman, my unforgiving friend. By Ursula K. Le Guin Man Lazy Tai Dreams Make

And so, because he won't let himself be hurt, he does wrong to those he loves best. And then he sees that, and after all, it hurts him. By Ursula K. Le Guin Wrong Loves Hurt Hurts

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant. By Ursula K. Le Guin Suppressed Doubt Imagination Child Eggplant

For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our better journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us. For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that. I do not know if we were right. By Ursula K. Le Guin Friendship Love Admitted Assuaged Rose

Prevne was crawling with agents, he went, even if you went to buy a newspaper your identification was checked. "Easier to have it tattooed on, like you," said Kasimir, "Move your foot, Stefan." - "Move your fat rump, then." - " Oh, mine are German numbers, out of date. A few more wars and I'll run out of skin." --- "Shed it, then, like a snake."---No, they go right down to the bone." --- Shed your bones, then," Stefan said, *be a jellyfish. Be an amoeba. When they pin me down, I bud off. Two little spineless Stefans where they thought they had one MR 64100282A. Four of them, eight, sixteen thirty-two sixty-four a hundred and twenty-eight, I would entirely cover the surface of the globe were it not for my natural enemies. By Ursula K. Le Guin Move Prevne Agents Checked Shed

But I don't know what my side is, he thought, as he went back to his chair by the window. The Liberation, of course, yes, but what is the Liberation? Not an ideal, the freedom of the enslaved. Not now. Never again. Since the Uprising, the Liberation is an army, a political body, a great number of people and leaders and would-be leaders, ambitions and greed clogging hopes and strength, a clumsy amateur semi-government lurching from violence to compromise, ever more complicated, never again to know the beautiful simplicity of the ideal, the pure idea of liberty. And By Ursula K. Le Guin Liberation Thought Window Side Back

This StoneHe went looking for a roadthat doesn't lead to death.He went looking for that roadand found it.It was a stone road.He walked that roadthat doesn't lead to death.He walked on it awhilebefore he stopped,having turned to stone.Now he stands there on that roadthat doesn't lead to deathnot going anywhere.He can't dance.from his eyes stones fall.The rainbow people pass himcrossing that road, long-legged, light-stepping,going from the Four Housesto the dancing in the Five Houses.They pick up his tears.This stone is a tearfrom his eye, this stonegiven me on the mountainby one who died before my birth,this stone, this stone. By Ursula K. Le Guin Lead Roadthat Stone Deathhe Longlegged

But nobody in one lifetime could read more than a fragment of what was here, this broken labyrinth of words, this shattered, interrupted story of a people and a world through the centuries, the millennia. By Ursula K. Le Guin Words Shattered Interrupted Centuries Millennia

I wonder if men find it easier than women do to consider people not as bodies, as lives, but as numbers, figures, toys of the mind to be pushed about a battleground of the mind. This disembodiment gives pleasure, exciting them and freeing them to act for the sake of acting, for the sake of manipulating the figures, the game pieces. Love of country, or honor, or freedom, then, may be names they give that pleasure to justify it to the gods and to the people who suffer and kill and die in the game. So those words - love, honor, freedom - are degraded from their true sense. Then people may come to hold them in contempt as meaningless, and poets must struggle to give them back their truth. By Ursula K. Le Guin Mind Figures People Bodies Lives

Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. By Ursula K. Le Guin Hard Coming Hope Times Wanting

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat ... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches. By Ursula K. Le Guin Translation Mysterious Translating Increasingly Felt

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Recalcitrant End Stood Fierce Stranger

It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke. By Ursula K. Le Guin Ancestors Altogether Bad Thing Criminal

The creative adult is the child who survived after the world tried killing them, making them grown up. The creative adult is the child who survived the blandness of schooling, the unhelpful words of bad teachers, and the nay-saying ways of the world. The creative adult is in essence simply that, a child. By Ursula K. Le Guin Creative Adult Child Survived World

The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them. By Ursula K. Le Guin Thought Existed Doctor Wanted Prove

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Work Power Profit Audience Mystery

If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we'll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival. By Ursula K. Le Guin Wrong Feminine Morality Rules Birth

Since he was very young he had known that in certain ways he was unlike anyone else he knew. For a child the consciousness of such difference is very painful, since, having done nothing yet and being incapable of doing anything, he cannot justify it. The reliable and affectionate presence of adults who are also, in their own way, different, is the only reassurance such a child can have; and Shevek had not had it. His father had indeed been utterly reliable and affectionate. Whatever Shevek was and whatever he did, Palat approved and was loyal. But Palat had not had this curse of difference. He was like the others, like all the others to whom community came so easy. He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that recognition of each person's solitude which alone transcends it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Shevek Knew Palat Young Unlike

Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice - the power of change, the essential function of life. By Ursula K. Le Guin Individual Power Sacrifice Compromise Stability

Who do you think is lying to us?" Shevek demanded. Placid, Bedap met his gaze. "Who, brother? Who but ourselves? By Ursula K. Le Guin Lying Bedap Placid Shevek Demanded

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art. By Ursula K. Le Guin Write Skill Writing Frees Show

I prefer to save talking till I know what I'm talking about. By Ursula K. Le Guin Talking Prefer Save Till

But I'm not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely! By Ursula K. Le Guin Lovely Stand Gravestone Life

Solitude was his fate; he was trapped in his heredity. By Ursula K. Le Guin Solitude Fate Heredity Trapped

Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas. By Ursula K. Le Guin Prose Commas Writers Interested Life

Ronde, one a live village and the other deserted, as dead as Karnak, By Ursula K. Le Guin Ronde Karnak Deserted Live Village

Greed puts out the sun. By Ursula K. Le Guin Greed Sun Puts

You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said ... 'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised. By Ursula K. Le Guin Fear Death Feared Rightly Terrible

She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary. By Ursula K. Le Guin Common Rejoicing Laboratories Seeking Boundary

Ursula K. Le Guin urges authors to remember why they do what they do. Her argument is that writing is an form of art rather than a commodity. By Ursula K. Le Guin Guin Ursula Urges Authors Remember

To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question. By Ursula K. Le Guin Question Exhibit Perfect Uselessness Knowing

We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We've made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can't see them, because they're part of our thinking. By Ursula K. Le Guin Crime Created Propertarians Laws Approval

People who sleep only two or three hours in the twenty-four are always geniuses. The ones you hear about, anyway. Never mind if the ones you don't hear about are dolts. Insomnia is genius. It must be. Think of all the work you could do the thoughts you could think, the books you could read, the love you could make, while the dull clods lie snoring. By Ursula K. Le Guin People Geniuses Sleep Hours Twentyfour

The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity," said a tall, soft-eyed girl. "Love is the true condition of human life."Bedap shook his head. "No. Shev's right," he said. "Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not. By Ursula K. Le Guin Love Solidarity Tall Softeyed Girl

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. By Ursula K. Le Guin Capitalism Live Inescapable Kings Power

Scholarly translations of the Tao Te Ching as a manual for rulers use a vocabulary that emphasizes the uniqueness of the Taoist "sage," his masculinity, his authority. This language is perpetuated, and degraded, in most popular versions. I wanted a Book of the Way accessible to a present-day, unwise, unpowerful, and perhaps unmale reader, not seeking esoteric secrets, but listening for a voice that speaks to the soul. I would like that reader to see why people have loved the book for twenty-five hundred years. By Ursula K. Le Guin Taoist Tao Ching Sage Scholarly

We read books to find out who we are. By Ursula K. Le Guin Read Books Find

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. By Ursula K. Le Guin Art Writers Difference Production Market

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Lot Book Connects Readers Thinking

Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment. By Ursula K. Le Guin Amazon Contentment Book Purchase Made

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Book Move Mind Heart Eyes

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality. By Ursula K. Le Guin Coming Poets Visionaries Hard Times

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 By Ursula K. Le Guin Unread Rejoice Differences Book Reading

A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book. By Ursula K. Le Guin Book Assumptions Dangerous Danger Threatens

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Meeting Disappointing Writers Meet Income

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book. By Ursula K. Le Guin Book Fifteen Fifty Told Understand

I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind. By Ursula K. Le Guin Mind Decided Trouble Print

The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us. By Ursula K. Le Guin Proper Natural Fitting Sack Bag

We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art. By Ursula K. Le Guin Art Writers Difference Production Commodity

By and large books are mankind's best invention. By Ursula K. Le Guin Invention Large Books Mankind

a book is a box of words until you open it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Book Box Words Open

Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them. By Ursula K. Le Guin Sort Writing Earlids Children Book

Well, we think that time 'passes,' flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers. By Ursula K. Le Guin Past Passes Time Flows Future

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul. By Ursula K. Le Guin Bach Word Page Note Creation

I am ... persuaded that Woolf was right, that every novel has a characteristic rhythm. And that if the writer hasn't listened for that rhythm and followed it, the sentences will be lame, the characters will be puppets, the story will be false. And if the writer can hold to that rhythm, the book will have some beauty. By Ursula K. Le Guin Rhythm Writer Woolf Persuaded Characteristic

All of us that read a lot, we're partly book-manufactured. By Ursula K. Le Guin Lot Bookmanufactured Read Partly

Ward: Which would you rather have, a National Book Award or a Hugo?Le Guin: Oh, a Nobel, of course.Ward: They don't give Nobel Awards in fantasy.Le Guin: Maybe I can do something for peace. By Ursula K. Le Guin Guin Nobel Hugo Ward National

While we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices ... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. By Ursula K. Le Guin Bonkers Insane Read Voices Existence

Change is freedom, change is life.It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed.There's a point, around age 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.Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls. By Ursula K. Le Guin Freedom Oneself Change Easier Make

Writing about our life in the House of Arcamand in the City State of Etra, I fall back into it and see it as I saw it then, from inside and from below, with nothing to compare it to, and as if it were the only way things could possibly be. Children see the world that way. So do most slaves. Freedom is largely a matter of seeing that there are alternatives. By Ursula K. Le Guin Etra House Arcamand City State

Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the love of nature" seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her. By Ursula K. Le Guin Passionate Concern Landscapes Living Creatures

He also had a kind of helpless politeness, which I took advantage of. He was quite incapable of refusing a direct request, and so, because I asked him to, he invited me to several parties during the month I stayed in Hemgogn. By Ursula K. Le Guin Politeness Kind Helpless Advantage Hemgogn

I will not go with you, nor will I be a slave of any Greek. The Earth Mother keeps me here. And you must go a long way for a long time, you must go, my sweet husband until at last, you come to the Western Land. There you will be a king and have a queen. No tears for me, but let your love guard our sun! By Ursula K. Le Guin Greek Slave Long Earth Mother

Our souls are old,br>often used before.br>The knife outlastsbr>the hand that holds it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Oldbr Beforebr Outlastsbr Souls Knife

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness. By Ursula K. Le Guin Unanswerable Darkness Learn Questions Answer

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Things Fiction People Story Science

Infinite are the arguments of mages, By Ursula K. Le Guin Infinite Mages Arguments

Why are men afraid of women?"If your strength is only the other's weakness, you live in fear," Ged said."Yes; but women seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves.""Are they ever taught to trust themselves?" Ged asked, and as he spoke Therru came in on her work again. His eyes and Tenar's met."No," she said. "Trust is not what we're taught." She watched the child stack the wood in the box. "If power were trust," she said. "I like that word. If it weren't all these arrangements - one above the other - kings and masters and mages and owners - It all seems so unnecessary. Real power, real freedom, would lie in trust, not force.""As children trust their parents," he said. By Ursula K. Le Guin Ged Afraid Women Strength Fear

He felt disinclined to move. To move would disturb the perfect, stable moment, the balance of the world. The winter light along the ceiling was beautiful beyond expression. He By Ursula K. Le Guin Move Felt Disinclined Perfect Stable

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Freedom Load Undertake Heavy Great

The heavy black she had worn for years was gone; her dress was of turquoise-colored silk, bright and soft as the evening sky. It belled out full from her hips, and all the skirt was embroidered with thin silver threads and seed pearls and tiny crumbs of crystal, so that it glittered softly, like rain in April. She looked at the magician, speechless. "Do you like it?" "Where - " "It's like a gown I saw a princess wear once, at the Feast of Sun-return in the New Palace in Havnor," he said, looking at it with satisfaction. "You told me to show you something worth seeing. I show you yourself. By Ursula K. Le Guin Silk Bright Sky Heavy Black

Sci-fi uses the images that sf - starting with H.G. Wells - made familiar: space travel, aliens, galactic wars and federations, time machines, et cetera, taking them literally, not caring if they are possible or even plausible. It has no interest in or relation to real science or technology. It's fantasy in space suits. Spectacle. Wizards with lasers. Kids with ray guns. I've written both, but I have to say I respect science fiction enough that I wince when people call it sci-fi. By Ursula K. Le Guin Starting Images Space Aliens Scifi

Most best-sellers are written for readers who are willing to be passive consumers. The blurbs on their covers often highlight the coercive, aggressive power of the text - compulsive page-turner, gut-wrenching, jolting, mind-searing, heart-stopping - what is this, electroshock torture? By Ursula K. Le Guin Consumers Bestsellers Written Readers Passive

All that grieved me - that I was half one thing and half another and nothing wholly - was the sorrow of my childhood, but the strength and use of my life after I grew up. By Ursula K. Le Guin Half Wholly Childhood Grieved Thing

They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, 'Arek!' Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark. By Ursula K. Le Guin Gun Burst Sonic Stunners Foray

I found out I was in love with you, winter before last," she said. "I wasn't going to say anything about it because - well, you know. If you'd felt anything like that for me, you'd have known I did. But it wasn't both of us. So there was no good in it. But then, when you told us you're leaving ... At first I thought, all the more reason to say nothing. But then I thought, that wouldn't be fair. To me, partly. Love has a right to be spoken. And you have a right to know that somebody loves you. That somebody has loved you, could love you. We all need to know that. [ ... ] By Ursula K. Le Guin Winter Love Found Thought Loves

In this they resemble any reasonable being who does an unreasonable thing and justifies it with reasons. War, for example. My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war. Our most rational and scientific justifications-for instance, that we are an aggressive species-are perfectly circular: we make war because we make war. Our justifications for making a particular war (such as: our people must have more land and more wealth, or: our people must have more power, or: our people must obey out deity's orders to crush the sacrilegious infidel) all come down to the same thing: we must make war because we must. We have no choice. We have no freedom. This argument is not ultimately satisfactory to the reasoning mind, which desires freedom. By Ursula K. Le Guin War People Make Making Reasons

A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One's freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one's own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. By Ursula K. Le Guin Choice Direction Promise Selflimitation Change

Reading is performance. The reader the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater. By Ursula K. Le Guin Performance Reading Silent Amazing Reader

It is what it looks like and is called. A jail. it is not a front for something else, not a facade, not a pseudonym. It is real, the real thing, the thing behind the words. By Ursula K. Le Guin Called Real Thing Jail Facade

A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it. By Ursula K. Le Guin God Person Part Play Fit

She didn't even ask me if I was going to go on flying. She knew I would. I don't understand the people who have wings and don't use them. I suppose they're interested in having a career. Maybe they were already in love with somebody on the ground. But it seems ... I don't know. I can't really understand it. Wanting to stay down. Choosing not to fly. Wingless people can't help it, it's not their fault they're grounded. But if you have wings ... By Ursula K. Le Guin Flying Wings Understand People Knew

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Life Long Bullock Roll Anger

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. By Ursula K. Le Guin Success Failure American Dream Places

The backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul. By Ursula K. Le Guin Sad Women Heroism Backside Servants

If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change. By Ursula K. Le Guin Season Midsummer Eternity Change Autumn

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss. By Ursula K. Le Guin Art Thou Safety End Silence

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Porch Bucket Left Bucketi Lazy

Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith. By Ursula K. Le Guin Faith Oracular Loopholes Ambiguity Statistical

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Love Refuse Arren Complete Undertake

He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe. By Ursula K. Le Guin Urras Iniquity People Inequity Waste

Cinders patter, falling with the snow. We creep infinitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself. Praise then Creation unfinished! By Ursula K. Le Guin Cinders Patter Falling Snow Creation

And he would watch the snow falling, thin and ceaseless, on the empty lands below the window, and feel the dull cold grow within him, till it seemed no feeling was left to him except a kind of weariness. By Ursula K. Le Guin Falling Thin Ceaseless Window Till

Then Ged pitied her. She was like a white deer caged, like a white bird wing-clipped, like a silver ring in an old man's finger. By Ursula K. Le Guin Ged Pitied White Caged Wingclipped

I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women ... women tend to eat less ... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing ... By Ursula K. Le Guin Thing Life Female Suppose Important

As the virtual world of electronic communication becomes the world many of us inhabit all the time, in turning to imaginative literature we may not be seeking mere reassurance nor be impelled by mere nostalgia. To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world. In one of T. S. Eliot's poems a bird sings, "Mankind cannot bear very much reality." I've always thought that bird was mistaken, or was talking only about some people. I find it amazing how much of the real world most of us can endure. Not only endure, but need, desire, crave. Reality is life. Where we suffocate is in the half-life of unreality, untruth, imitation, fakery, the almost-true that is not true. To be human is to live both within and beyond the narrow band of what-happens-now, in the vast regions of the past and the possible, the known and the imagined: our real world, our true Now. By Ursula K. Le Guin World Mere Real Time Nostalgia

The sleeper turns his back on everyone. By Ursula K. Le Guin Sleeper Turns Back

'But I might ask you as profitably why you've never seen fit to invent airborne vehicles? One small stolen airplane would have spared you and me a great deal of difficulty!' 'How would it ever occur to a sane man that he could fly?' Estraven said sternly. It was a fair response, on a world where no living thing is winged. By Ursula K. Le Guin Vehicles Profitably Fit Invent Airborne

Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name's the motherof the ten thousand things. By Ursula K. Le Guin Heaven Unnamed Things Earthbegin Motherof

Nobody owns anything to rob ... As for violence ... Oiie, would you murder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order. By Ursula K. Le Guin Rob Oiie Ordinarily Violence Coercion

Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part. By Ursula K. Le Guin Love Mortals Forever Part Parted

Kids could and did swim in it happily as in their native element, at least until some teacher or professor told them they had to come out, dry off, and breathe modernism ever after. By Ursula K. Le Guin Kids Element Dry Swim Happily

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny. By Ursula K. Le Guin World Men Feelings Destiny Imaginative

There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my careermy agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I could send her an utterly indescribable story, and she'd sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorkershe knew where to take it. She never told me what to write or not write, she never told me, That won't sell, and she never meddled with my prose. By Ursula K. Le Guin Kidd Virginia Person Greatly Directly

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass. By Ursula K. Le Guin Function Things Machine Universe Part

The great authors share their souls with us- literally. By Ursula K. Le Guin Literally Great Authors Share Souls

The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority. By Ursula K. Le Guin Tao Ching Partly Poetry Prose

Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman's power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. By Ursula K. Le Guin Deeper Older Woman Power Roots

And she told me the same thing, she said that when I came back in the winter, she was going to miss missing me ... By Ursula K. Le Guin Thing Winter Told Back Miss

To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It's worth it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Make Wholeness Spirit Give Seek

It was the most beautiful view Shevek had ever seen. The tenderness and vitality of the colors, the mixture of rectilinear human design and powerful, proliferate natural contours, the variety and harmony of the elements, gave an impression of complex wholeness such as he had never seen, except, perhaps, foreshadowed on a small scale in certain serene and thoughtful human faces. By Ursula K. Le Guin Shevek Beautiful View Human Colors

What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end By Ursula K. Le Guin Liberty Begun Learn Weight Choice

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller. By Ursula K. Le Guin Things Power Permanent Universal Exercise

Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate. By Ursula K. Le Guin Smiles Bells Parades Horses Bleh

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose ... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? By Ursula K. Le Guin Die Lose Sea Save Selfhood

But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power ... It must follow knowledge, and serve need. By Ursula K. Le Guin Thing Pebble Sand Act Equilibrium

A man gives out, dearie. A woman takes in. By Ursula K. Le Guin Dearie Man Woman

Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists? By Ursula K. Le Guin Artists Respectable Society Trusted

What will the creature made all of sea-drift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking? His By Ursula K. Le Guin Waking Daylight Morning Creature Made

When you have nothing to pray for, that's when Luck hears you. If By Ursula K. Le Guin Luck Pray Hears

All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth. By Ursula K. Le Guin Partial Infinitesimally Knowledge Truth Reason

George Orr stayed in Portland because he had always lived there and because he had no reason to believe that life anywhere else would be better, or different. By Ursula K. Le Guin Orr Portland George Stayed Lived

Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness. By Ursula K. Le Guin Greater Unlearned Possessed Kindness Skill

To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side. By Ursula K. Le Guin Tenar Die Reborn Side Hard

He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand. By Ursula K. Le Guin System Demand Appalled Examination Explained

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto. By Ursula K. Le Guin Ghetto Fiction Genre Sealing Society

An Odonian's goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive. By Ursula K. Le Guin Odonian Positive Negative Goal Suffering

We live well in the houses, well enough, but we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars. Now, we dare not go 100 miles from home. We keep a little knowledge and do nothing with it, but once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life. By Ursula K. Le Guin Houses Fear Live Ruled Utterly

The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities. By Ursula K. Le Guin Forces Women Control Preservation Life

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive. By Ursula K. Le Guin Science Prescriptive Descriptive Fiction

[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well. By Ursula K. Le Guin Ignorance Literature Stop Ignorant Snobs

The fact that the Hegnish have absolutely no interest in any people except themselves can also cause offense, or even rage. Foreigners exist. That is all the Hegnish know about them, and all they care to know. They are too polite to say that it is a pity that foreigners exist, but if they had to think about it, they would think so. By Ursula K. Le Guin Hegnish Offense Rage Exist Fact

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 ... By Ursula K. Le Guin Evil Language Choose Difference Good

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention. By Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Superior Invention Realistic Definition

The autumn stars had come out, incredible in number and brilliance, twinkling and almost blinking because of the dust stirred up by the earthquake and the wind, so that the whole sky seemed to tremble, a shaking of diamond chips, a scintillation of sunlight on a black sea. By Ursula K. Le Guin Incredible Brilliance Twinkling Wind Tremble

There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time. As all the stars may be reflected in a round raindrop falling in the night: so too do all the stars reflect the raindrop. There is neither darkness nor death, for all things are, in the Light of the Moment, and their end and their beginning are one. By Ursula K. Le Guin Time Center Things Source End

Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas. By Ursula K. Le Guin Night Falls Streets Yellow Lit

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? By Ursula K. Le Guin Tales Wondered Makers Leave Housekeeping

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Arren Throws Misses Rock Act

I think one cannot be left alive among so many deaths without feeling unendurable shame. By Ursula K. Le Guin Shame Left Alive Deaths Feeling

He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him. By Ursula K. Le Guin Rites Religion Barbaric Elaborate Unnecessary

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing. By Ursula K. Le Guin Introverts Writes Nice Outgoing Extroverts

You were the vessel of evil. The Evil is poured out. It is done. It is buried in it's own tomb. You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light By Ursula K. Le Guin Evil Vessel Made Poured Tomb

There were several completely mysterious electrical devices connected with the washstand, and the water valve did not cut off when you released the faucet but kept pouring out until shut off - a sign, Shevek thought, either of great faith in human nature, or of great quantities of hot water. By Ursula K. Le Guin Shevek Great Water Washstand Sign

The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. By Ursula K. Le Guin Repetitive Atemporal Circular Search Pleasure

I'm not dead. I sleep sometimes. Sleep comes very close to death, everyone knows that. The dead walk in dreams, everyone knows that. They come to you alive, and they say things. They walk out of death into the dreams. By Ursula K. Le Guin Dreams Dead Sleep Death Walk

She the stranger, the foreigner, of alien blood and mind, did not share his power or his conscience or his knowledge or his exile. She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their great difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that in joining them together, freed them. By Ursula K. Le Guin Stranger Foreigner Mind Exile Difference

Sentences aren't. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man: I am not even young. Just about the time they finally started inventing women, I started getting old. And I went right on doing it. Shamelessly. I have allowed myself to get old and haven't done one single thing about it, with a gun or anything. What By Ursula K. Le Guin Sentences Started Full Syntax Qualifying

People had huddled back into the old core of the city; and once the suburbs had been looted, they burned. Like Moscow in 1812, acts of God or vandalism: they were no longer wanted, and they burned. By Ursula K. Le Guin Burned People City Looted Huddled

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Evil Asked Man Younger Web

WE stowed the wheels, uncapped the sledge-runners, put on our sis, and took off down, north, onward, into that silent vastness of fire an ice that said in enormous letters of black and white DEATH, DEATH, written right across a continent. The sledge pulled like a feather, and we laughed with joy. By Ursula K. Le Guin Death North Onward Wheels Uncapped

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone. By Ursula K. Le Guin Grieving Blind Business Strange Learn

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principle moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories. By Ursula K. Le Guin Anarchism Odonianism Kropotkin Goldman Goodman

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city. Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. By Ursula K. Le Guin Festival Summer Soaring City Clamor

You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough. By Ursula K. Le Guin God Person Good People Play

If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives ... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. By Ursula K. Le Guin Thing Beautiful Planets Lives Day

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 earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death. By Ursula K. Le Guin Day Job Tired Pattern Hard

There is solid evidence for the fact that when women speak more than 30 percent of the time, men perceive them as dominating the conversation; well, similarly, if, say, two women in a row get one of the big annual literary awards, masculine voices start talking about feminist cabals, political correctness, and the decline of fairness in judging. The 30 percent rule is really powerful. If more than one woman out of four or five won the Pulitzer, the PEN/Faulkner, the Booker - if more than one woman in ten were to win the Nobel literature prize - the ensuing masculine furore would devalue and might destroy the prize. Apparently, literary guys can only compete with each other. Put on a genuinely equal competitive footing with women, they get hysterical. By Ursula K. Le Guin Percent Similarly Women Time Men

One of the rocks in my soulbag, a little grey rock that I had picked up on a certain day in a certain place in the hills above the river in the Silver Time, a little piece of my world, that became my world. |Every night I took it out and held it in my hand while I lay in bed waiting to sleep, thinking of the sunlight on the hills above the river, listening to the soft shushing of the ship's systems, like a mechanical sea. By Ursula K. Le Guin World Time Silver Hills River

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees. By Ursula K. Le Guin Things Learned Silence Animals Birds

I'm old to be raising a child. And she ... She obeys me, but only because she wants to." "It's the only justification for obedience," Ged observed. By Ursula K. Le Guin Child Raising Ged Obedience Observed

Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises. By Ursula K. Le Guin Time Aspects Arrow River Change

His alarm clock ticked by the head of the bed. He gazed at its whitish face, the hands both drawing downward. There were no clocks, there. There were no hours. It was not the river of time flowing that moved the clock's hands forward; their mechanism moved them. Seeing them move men said, Time is passing, passing, but they were fooled by the clocks they made. It is we who pass through time, Hugh thought. By Ursula K. Le Guin Bed Time Alarm Ticked Head

Honestly, orthodoxy concerns me about as much as it concerns your average jackrabbit. I only follow rules that take me where I want to go. If there aren't any rules, I make up my own (and follow them strictly). By Ursula K. Le Guin Honestly Concerns Orthodoxy Jackrabbit Average

Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number - Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysis, every now and then. By Ursula K. Le Guin Apollo Harmony Number Light Reason

Pride kept her from confiding in the other girls, and caution kept her from confessing to the older women. By Ursula K. Le Guin Pride Girls Women Confiding Caution

He keeps some goats, and a garden patch. In autumn he goes wandering over the island, alone, in the forests, on the mountainsides, through the valleys of the rivers. I lived there once with him, when I was younger than you are now. I didn't stay long, I hadn't the sense to stay. I went off seeking evil, and sure enough I found it ... But you come escaping evil; seeking freedom; seeking silence for a while, until you find your own way. There you will find kindness and silence, Tenar. There the lamp will burn out of the wind awhile. By Ursula K. Le Guin Goats Patch Garden Seeking Evil

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Fool Government Man Detest Bad

Fiction is made out of the writer's experience, his whole life from infancy on, everything he's thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn't something you go and get - it's a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that "experience"; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing. By Ursula K. Le Guin Experience Fiction Dreamed Made Writer

People are supposed to be lean. You can't be too thin, everybody says so, especially anorexics. People are supposed to be lean and taut, because that's how men generally are, lean and taut, or anyhow that's how a lot of men start out and some of them even stay that way. And men are people, people are men, that has been well established, and so people, real people, the right kind of people, are lean. But I'm really lousy at being people, because I'm not lean at all but sort of podgy, with actual fat places. I am untaut. By Ursula K. Le Guin People Lean Men Supposed Taut

Up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society, and its rules, as he from his. By Ursula K. Le Guin Isolate Ice Singular Society Rules

In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell. By Ursula K. Le Guin Airport Luggageladen Corridors Inaccurate Hell

I think if you have lost a great happiness and try to recall it, you are only asking for sorrow, but if you do not try to dwell on the happiness, sometimes you find it dwelling in your heart and body, silent but sustaining. By Ursula K. Le Guin Happiness Sorrow Body Silent Sustaining

Contrast J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. The author adopts the childish view of adults as inhumanly powerful and uncomprehending, and never goes beyond it; and so his novel, published for adults, is better appreciated by ten-year-olds. The By Ursula K. Le Guin Contrast Rye Salinger Catcher Adults

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Fear Close Unname Night Day

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, alwaysI think any poet who's worked in form will agree with meis that the form leads you to what you want to say. By Ursula K. Le Guin Form Work Sonnet Villanelle Fill

I don't know. I love the idea of democracy, the hope, yes, I love that. I couldn't live without that. But the country? You mean the thing on the map, lines, everything inside the lines is good and nothing outside them matters? How can an adult love such a childish idea? By Ursula K. Le Guin Love Idea Lines Democracy Hope

Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality. By Ursula K. Le Guin Fantasy Reality Oldest Literary Device

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child ... that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination. By Ursula K. Le Guin Child Outgrowing Survived Maturity Growing

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Leaving Tent Brightness Sledge Estraven

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness. By Ursula K. Le Guin Virginity Significance Waiting Room Mere

My heart told me incontrovertibly that neither gender could go far without the other. So, in my story, neither the woman nor the man can get free without the other. By Ursula K. Le Guin Heart Told Incontrovertibly Gender Story

He copulated with a number of girls, but copulation was not the joy it ought to be. It was a mere relief of need, like evacuating, and he felt ashamed of it afterward because it involved another person as object. By Ursula K. Le Guin Girls Copulated Number Copulation Joy

There were actually very few men who could face reality when the going got tough. By Ursula K. Le Guin Tough Men Face Reality

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself. By Ursula K. Le Guin State Individual Bargain Power Recognizes

I suppose the Valley of the Na, in Always Coming Home, is where I think I'd most like to live; but that's partly because I did live there, all the summers of my childhood. By Ursula K. Le Guin Home Valley Coming Live Childhood

Verbal imagery (such as a simile or a description of a place or an event) is more physical, more bodily, than thinking or feeling, but less physical, more internal, than the actual sounds of the words. Imagery takes place in "the imagination," which I take to be the meeting place of the thinking mind with the sensing body. What is imagined isn't physically real, but it feels as if it were: the reader sees or hears or feels what goes on in the story, is drawn into it, exists in it, among its images, in the imagination (the reader's? the writer's?) while reading. By Ursula K. Le Guin Physical Place Imagery Thinking Imagination

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself - as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation - you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. By Ursula K. Le Guin Person Class Nation Reality Women

What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make; I can only undo, unmake. By Ursula K. Le Guin Shadow Body Casts Deny Twodimensional

I am sorry, I am very sorry to ask you to lie, he said, so earnestly that I wondered if it hurt him to lie. That made him seem more like a god than a human being. If it hurt to lie, how could you stay alive? By Ursula K. Le Guin Lie Hurt Earnestly Wondered Made

You can't change anything from the outside in. Standing apart, looking down, talking the overview, you see pattern. What's wrong, what's missing. You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving. By Ursula K. Le Guin Change Weaving Standing Talking Overview

He is the earth and sunlight, the leaves of trees, the eagle's flight. He is alive. And all who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. By Ursula K. Le Guin Sunlight Trees Flight Earth Leaves

What is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? By Ursula K. Le Guin Giving Apply Love Sense Boundary

I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy. By Ursula K. Le Guin Happy Reason Happiness Time Joy

The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts. By Ursula K. Le Guin Time Thought Wasted Thing Working

As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear's shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea. By Ursula K. Le Guin Ogion Game Man Boy Boys

How men feared women! she thought, walking among the late-flowering roses. Not as individuals, but women when they talked together, worked together, spoke up for one another then men saw plots, cabals, constraints, traps being laid.Of course they were right. Women were likely, as women, to take the next generation's part, not this one's; they were the links men saw as chains, the bonds men saw as bondage. By Ursula K. Le Guin Men Women Feared Cabals Constraints

Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible ... It was more than diginity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved.The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything. By Ursula K. Le Guin Eyes Invisible Suddenly Lunatic Hair

It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist. By Ursula K. Le Guin Exist Hard Swear Sex Dirty

Those who dislike fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled by science. They don't like either hobbits, or quasars; they don't feel at home with them; they don't want complexities, remoteness. If there is any such connection, I'll bet that it is basically an aesthetic one By Ursula K. Le Guin Science Dislike Fantasy Equally Bored

Ged stood sick and haggard. He said at last, "Better I had died." "Who are you to judge that, you for whom Nemmerle gave his life? - You are safe here. You will live here, and go on with your training. They tell me you were clever. Go on and do your work. Do it well. It is all you can do. By Ursula K. Le Guin Ged Haggard Stood Sick Nemmerle

Writers are egotists. All artists are. They can't be altruists and get their work done. And writers love to whine about the Solitude of the Author's Life, and lock themselves into cork-lined rooms or droop around in bars in order to whine better. But although most writing is done in solitude, I believe that it is done, like all the arts, for an audience. That is to say, with an audience. All the arts are performance arts, only some of them are sneakier about it than others. By Ursula K. Le Guin Egotists Arts Audience Solitude Writers

In a good season one trusts life; in a bad season one only hopes. But they are of the same essence: they are the mind's indispensable relationship with other minds, with the world, and with time. Without trust, a man lives, but not a human life; without hope, he dies. When there is no relationship, where hands do not touch, emotion atrophies in void and intelligence goes sterile and obsessed. Between men the only link left is that of owner to slave, or murderer to victim. By Ursula K. Le Guin Season Life Good Bad Relationship

Why hadn't she been a detective instead of a goddamn stupid third-class civil rights lawyer? She hated the law. It took an aggressive, assertive personality. She didn't have it. She had a sneaky, sly, shy, squamous personality. She had French diseases of the soul. By Ursula K. Le Guin Lawyer Detective Goddamn Stupid Thirdclass

We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report. By Ursula K. Le Guin World Intentionally Make Faced Chaos

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth! By Ursula K. Le Guin Truth Writers Moments Speak Serve

If nobody teaches us the words, the thoughts, we stay ignorant. If nobody shows a little child, two, three years old, how to look for the way, the signs of the path, the landmarks, then it gets lost in the mountain, doesn't it? And dies in the night, in the cold. By Ursula K. Le Guin Words Thoughts Ignorant Teaches Stay

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. By Ursula K. Le Guin Permanent Intolerable Uncertainty Thing Makes

As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star. By Ursula K. Le Guin Goddess Spring Passion Stars Star

I thought the same thing, exactly. We always say that. you said it--you should have refused to go to Rolny. I said it as soon as I got to Elbow; I'm a free man. I didn't have to come here!...We always think it, and say it, but we don't do it. We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind, like a room where we can come and say, 'I don't have to do anything, I make my own choices, I'm free.' And then we leave the little room in our mind, and go where PDC posts us, and stay till we're reposted. By Ursula K. Le Guin Thing Thought Mind Rolny Free

I suspect that the distinction between a maternal and a paternal instinct is scarcely worth making; the parental instinct, the wish to protect, to further, is not a sex-linked characteristic ... By Ursula K. Le Guin Instinct Making Protect Characteristic Suspect

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Present Uninhabitable Future Live Arise

The poet Gary Snyder's finely unpoetic image of composting is useful here. Stuff goes into the writer, a whole lot of stuff, not notes in a notebook but everything seen and heard and felt all day every day, a lot of garbage, leftovers, dead leaves, eyes of potatoes, artichoke stems, forests, streets, rooms in slums, mountain ranges, voices, screams, dreams, whispers, smells, blows, eyes, gaits, gestures, the touch of a hand, a whistle in the night, the slant of light on the wall of a child's room, a fin in a waste of waters. All this stuff goes down into the novelist's personal compost bin, where it combines, recombines, changes; gets dark, mulchy, fertile, turns into ground. A seed falls into it, the ground nourishes the seed with the richness that went into it, and something grows. But what grows isn't an artichoke stem and a potato eye and a gesture. It's a new thing, a new whole. It's made up. By Ursula K. Le Guin Gary Snyder Stuff Lot Poet

With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents to drink and be clean and irrigate with, using water mindfully, carefully. They lived in a land that answers greed with drought and death. A difficult land: aloof yet sensitive. By Ursula K. Le Guin River Carefully Ceremony Reassurance Mindfully

The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow. By Ursula K. Le Guin Balance Shadow World Light Candle

It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries;but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps at them too soon, hurries, grabs. She doesn't wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because she's a writer; she wants to say this, and tell people that, and show people something else - things she knows, her ideas, her opinions, her beliefs, important things - but she doesn't wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word. By Ursula K. Le Guin Distractions Worries Hurries Grabs Things

Our entire pattern of socio-sexual interaction is nonexistent here. They cannot play the game. They do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imagination to accept. What is the first question we ask about a newborn baby? By Ursula K. Le Guin Entire Pattern Sociosexual Interaction Nonexistent

Facts are no more slid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. Bot both are sensitive. By Ursula K. Le Guin Coherent Round Facts Slid Real

But you're so strong. I wish I were strong. I just like eating. By Ursula K. Le Guin Strong Eating

I saw that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't save each other. Or ourselves.""What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You're denying brotherhood, Shevek!" the tall girl cried."No - no, I'm not. I'm trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins - it begins in shared pain. By Ursula K. Le Guin Shevek Begins Brotherhood Save Ourselves

For heroes do not make history - that is the historian's job - but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war. By Ursula K. Le Guin Passive History Job Swept Change

When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. "Do they expect students not to be anarchists?" he said. "What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up By Ursula K. Le Guin Upset Laughed Found Administrators Bottom

He said after a little while, 'I see why you say that only men do evil, I think. Even sharks are innocent, they kill because they must.' 'That is why nothing can resist us. Only one thing in the worl can resist an evil-hearted man. And that is another man. In our shame is our glory. Only our spirit, which is capable of evil, is capable of overcoming it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Men Evil Man Resist Capable

I hope you'll understand that I am not quoting those great words lightly. I do mean it. Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom. By Ursula K. Le Guin Lightly Free Hope Understand Quoting

I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps. By Ursula K. Le Guin Candle Steps Burns Love Man

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom. By Ursula K. Le Guin True Afraid Fantasy Factual Children

The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren't about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men. By Ursula K. Le Guin Europe England Men Written Children

Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision. By Ursula K. Le Guin Thing Thou Shalt Kill Abstractions

And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession. By Ursula K. Le Guin Made Strangest Nightmare Street Millions

When we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before. By Ursula K. Le Guin Crossed Find Face Good Bit

Overhead the evening sky lay deep and colorless, and all around her nodded the tall weeds with dry, white, close-floreted heads. She had never known what they were called. The flowers nodded above her head, swaying in the wind that always blew across the fields in the dusk. She ran among them, and they whipped lithe aside and stood up again swaying, silent. By Ursula K. Le Guin White Overhead Colorless Dry Closefloreted

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions. By Ursula K. Le Guin Borderline Prose Poetry Fogshrouded Literary

Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism , Christianity , and Islam , and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism . For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live. By Ursula K. Le Guin Christianity Judaism Islam Buddhism Belief

I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. By Ursula K. Le Guin Footwork Dull Task Heard Dancer

It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed. By Ursula K. Le Guin Oneself Easier Find Disapproval Syndics

I hate complaining to strangers you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well. By Ursula K. Le Guin Hate Complaining Strangers Complain Satisfactorily

What good is music? None, Gage thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and leaders, music says, 'You are irrelevant'; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, 'Listen.' For being saved is not the point. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses that men build for themselves, that they may see the sky. By Ursula K. Le Guin Point Good Music Gage Listen

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper. By Ursula K. Le Guin Words Person Souls Writer Cares

Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison? By Ursula K. Le Guin Freedom Choice Law Punishment Live

It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry. By Ursula K. Le Guin Poetry Death Understand

But because she was not a girl now, she was not awed, but only wondered at how men ordered their world into this dance of masks, and how easily a woman might learn to dance it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Awed Masks Dance Girl Wondered

The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be (as Nim put it) "tied down to childbearing," implies that no one is quite so thoroughly "tied down" here as women, elsewhere are likely to bepsychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else. By Ursula K. Le Guin Tied Nim Childbearing Implies Women

She could not have been born gray. Hercolor, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixednature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people's world. She had not been born. By Ursula K. Le Guin Born Gray Hercolor Baltic Brown

I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being. By Ursula K. Le Guin Propagandist Matter Good Stories Square

And not only narrativity but the quality of the writing is of the first importance to me. Rightly or not, I believe a dull, inept style signals poverty or incompleteness of thought. I see the accuracy, scope, and quality of Darwin's intellect directly expressed in the clarity, strength, and vitality of his writing - the beauty of it. By Ursula K. Le Guin Quality Narrativity Importance Writing Darwin

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. By Ursula K. Le Guin Creator Toch Myth