Ursula K. Le Guin quotes:

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  • In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

  • The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

  • I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

  • 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.

  • The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

  • We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

  • The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

  • There are no right answers to wrong questions.

  • It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

  • I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

  • There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.

  • I've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.

  • 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.

  • Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

  • As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

  • It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.

  • 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 ethicalThere is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.

  • To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

  • To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

  • 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?

  • To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

  • 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.

  • Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.

  • Without war there are no heroes.What harm would that be?Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.

  • In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.

  • Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.

  • I never knew anybody who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

  • What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.

  • To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.

  • What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice

  • ...[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.

  • In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way round: the university conferred superiority on the man."

  • One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion."

  • The creative adult is the child who has survived.

  • 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.

  • The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.

  • 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.

  • Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them, all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal?-What is it but death-death without rebirth?

  • 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.

  • It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.

  • 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.

  • The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

  • Ignorant power is a bane!

  • The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

  • What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

  • 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.

  • Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

  • To see a candle's light, one must take it into a dark place. This is the same as to see the good and be grateful, one must compare and contrast it with something worse - not better!

  • 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.

  • The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.

  • Certainly the effort to remain unchanged, young, when the body gives so impressive a signal of change as the menopause, is gallant; but it is a stupid, self-sacrificial gallantry, better befitting a boy of twenty than a woman of forty-five or fifty. Let the athletes die young and laurel-crowned. Let the soldiers earn the Purple Hearts. Let women die old, white-crowned, with human hearts.

  • The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.

  • Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

  • O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.

  • That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.

  • Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?

  • I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

  • The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

  • Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.

  • My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.

  • She obeys me, but only because she wants to. It's the only justification for obedience, Ged observed.

  • Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.

  • In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.

  • 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.

  • My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.

  • 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.

  • Owning is owing, having is hoarding.

  • 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.

  • 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 musn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...Insofar as I love life, I love [my country], but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.

  • ... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.

  • We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

  • The light is the left hand of darkness

  • Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.

  • 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.

  • Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.

  • Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.

  • As you see, I bear some resentment and some scars from the years of anti-genre bigotry. My own fiction, which moves freely around among realism, magical realism, science fiction, fantasy of various kinds, historical fiction, young adult fiction, parable, and other subgenres, to the point where much of it is ungenrifiable, all got shoved into the Sci Fi wastebasket or labeled as kiddilit--subliterature.

  • No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.

  • The menopause is probably the least glamorous topic imaginable; and this is interesting, because it is one of the very few topics to which cling some shreds and remnants of taboo. A serious mention of menopause is usually met with uneasy silence; a sneering reference to it is usually met with relieved sniggers. Both the silence and the sniggering are pretty sure indications of taboo.

  • True understanding is the spur of genius

  • The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both.

  • The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.

  • Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well.

  • If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

  • 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.

  • At the pit's bottom is no anger.

  • I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.

  • My Real Children starts quietly, then suddenly takes you on two roller-coaster rides at once, swooping dizzily through a double panorama and ending in a sort of super Sophie's Choice. A daring tour de force.

  • Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.

  • The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.

  • 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.

  • Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance.

  • 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.

  • A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.

  • What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone.

  • 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

  • I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.

  • 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.

  • Ours is only a little power, seems like, next to theirs, Moss saidBut it goes down deep. It's all roots. It's like an old blackberry thicket. And a wizard's power's like a fir tree, maybe, great and tall and grand, but it'll blow right down in a storm. Nothing kills a blackberry bramble.

  • It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.

  • So rest a while, we can talk in the cool of the evening. Or the cool of the morning. There 's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was." -HawkWho had been ArchmageThe Other Wind

  • For discipline is the channel in which our acts run strong and deep; where there is no direction, the deeds of men run shallow and wander and are wasted.

  • A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.

  • I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is he'll be much godlier after he's dead.

  • Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?

  • He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.

  • Oh, Hank," Susan whispered, "their wings are furry.""Oh, James," Harriet whispered, "their hands are kind.

  • Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher?

  • To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.

  • The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.

  • I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write.

  • 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.

  • When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

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