authors

Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Our life is full of empty space.
 -- Umberto Eco
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To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
 -- Umberto Eco
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A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
 -- Umberto Eco
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In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.
 -- Umberto Eco
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People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.
 -- Umberto Eco
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When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
 -- Umberto Eco
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My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.
 -- Umberto Eco
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To play the trumpet, you must train your lips for a long time. When I was twelve or thirteen I was a good player, but I lost the skill and now I play very badly. I do it every day even so. The reason is that I want to return to my childhood. For me, the trumpet is evidence of the sort of young man I was.
 -- Umberto Eco
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A secret is powerful when it is empty.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.
 -- Umberto Eco
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You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.
 -- Umberto Eco
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But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Translation is the art of failure.
 -- Umberto Eco
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When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
 -- Umberto Eco
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What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.
 -- Umberto Eco
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.
 -- Umberto Eco
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When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
 -- Umberto Eco
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Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, 'How are you, you old scoundrel!' clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.
 -- Umberto Eco
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How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.
 -- Umberto Eco
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There are books on our shelves we haven't read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
 -- Umberto Eco
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We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.
 -- Umberto Eco
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A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The most interesting letters I received about 'The Name of the Rose' were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn't understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Young people do not watch television; they are on the Internet.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to superstition.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Beauty is boring because it is predictable.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.
 -- Umberto Eco
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If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.
 -- Umberto Eco
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It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
 -- Umberto Eco
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There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Libraries can take the place of God.
 -- Umberto Eco
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We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don't know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us - but is living close to us.
 -- Umberto Eco
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One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.
 -- Umberto Eco
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All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.
 -- Umberto Eco
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If western culture is shown to be rich, it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to 'dissolve' harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
 -- Umberto Eco
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We like lists because we don't want to die.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Dan Brown is a character from 'Foucault's Pendulum!' I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations - the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
 -- Umberto Eco
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History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.
 -- Umberto Eco
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When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
 -- Umberto Eco
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As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
 -- Umberto Eco
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But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.
 -- Umberto Eco
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When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.
 -- Umberto Eco
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With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the U.S.A. and China.
 -- Umberto Eco
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A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar 'queen,' alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.
 -- Umberto Eco
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It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.
 -- Umberto Eco
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We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we, too, would become Taliban.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
 -- Umberto Eco
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There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.
 -- Umberto Eco
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My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.
 -- Umberto Eco
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My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.
 -- Umberto Eco
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From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.
 -- Umberto Eco
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After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.
 -- Umberto Eco
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It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.
 -- Umberto Eco
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There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.
 -- Umberto Eco
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It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
 -- Umberto Eco
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If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Political satire is a serious thing. In democratic newspapers throughout the world there are daily cartoons that often are not even funny, as is the case especially in many English-language newspapers. Instead, they contain a political message, and the artist takes full responsibility.
 -- Umberto Eco
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As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I write what I write.
 -- Umberto Eco
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At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Human beings are religious animals.
 -- Umberto Eco
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It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.
 -- Umberto Eco
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The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
 -- Umberto Eco
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Our most noted satirists are true columnists, and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented expose.
 -- Umberto Eco
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I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22.
 -- Umberto Eco
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There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven't read, that we haven't had the time to read.
 -- Umberto Eco
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There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Dream in a pragmatic way.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
 -- Aldous Huxley
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All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Every man's memory is his private literature.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Experience teaches only the teachable.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
 -- Aldous Huxley
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A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The proper study of mankind is books.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
 -- George Orwell
%
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
 -- George Orwell
%
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
 -- George Orwell
%
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
 -- George Orwell
%
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
 -- George Orwell
%
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
 -- George Orwell
%
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
 -- George Orwell
%
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
 -- George Orwell
%
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
 -- George Orwell
%
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
 -- George Orwell
%
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
 -- George Orwell
%
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
 -- George Orwell
%
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.
 -- George Orwell
%
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
 -- George Orwell
%
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
 -- George Orwell
%
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
 -- George Orwell
%
Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
 -- George Orwell
%
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
 -- George Orwell
%
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
 -- George Orwell
%
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
 -- George Orwell
%
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
 -- George Orwell
%
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
 -- George Orwell
%
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
 -- George Orwell
%
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
 -- George Orwell
%
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
 -- George Orwell
%
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
 -- George Orwell
%
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
 -- George Orwell
%
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
 -- George Orwell
%
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
 -- George Orwell
%
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
 -- George Orwell
%
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
 -- George Orwell
%
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
 -- George Orwell
%
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
 -- George Orwell
%
Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
 -- George Orwell
%
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
 -- George Orwell
%
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
 -- George Orwell
%
Big Brother is watching you.
 -- George Orwell
%
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
 -- George Orwell
%
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
 -- George Orwell
%
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
 -- George Orwell
%
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
 -- George Orwell
%
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
 -- George Orwell
%
Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.
 -- George Orwell
%
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
 -- George Orwell
%
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
 -- George Orwell
%
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
 -- George Orwell
%
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
 -- George Orwell
%
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
 -- George Orwell
%
We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.
 -- George Orwell
%
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
 -- George Orwell
%
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
 -- George Orwell
%
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
 -- George Orwell
%
Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
 -- George Orwell
%
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
 -- George Orwell
%
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
 -- George Orwell
%
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
 -- George Orwell
%
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
 -- George Orwell
%
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
 -- George Orwell
%
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
 -- George Orwell
%
Four legs good, two legs bad.
 -- George Orwell
%
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
 -- George Orwell
%
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
 -- George Orwell
%
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
 -- George Orwell
%
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
 -- George Orwell
%
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.
 -- George Orwell
%
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
 -- George Orwell
%
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
 -- George Orwell
%
If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?
 -- George Orwell
%
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
 -- George Orwell
%
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
 -- George Orwell
%
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
 -- George Orwell
%
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
 -- George Orwell
%
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
 -- George Orwell
%
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
 -- George Orwell
%
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
 -- George Orwell
%
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
 -- George Orwell
%
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
 -- George Orwell
%
For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.
 -- George Orwell
%
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
 -- George Orwell
%
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
 -- George Orwell
%
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
 -- George Orwell
%
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
 -- George Orwell
%
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
 -- George Orwell
%
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
 -- George Orwell
%
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
 -- George Orwell
%
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
 -- George Orwell
%
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
 -- George Orwell
%
One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.
 -- George Orwell
%
Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
 -- George Orwell
%
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
 -- George Orwell
%
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
 -- George Orwell
%
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
 -- George Orwell
%
Good writing is like a windowpane.
 -- George Orwell
%
Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
 -- George Orwell
%
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
 -- George Orwell
%
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
 -- George Orwell
%
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
 -- George Orwell
%
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
 -- George Orwell
%
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
 -- George Orwell
%
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
 -- George Orwell
%
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
 -- George Orwell
%
Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
The Martians are always coming.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
I dreamed: I am the fish whose flesh is eaten, and because I am fat, it is good.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
The core of my writing is not art but truth.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
I am one of the elect, one of the few in the know, in the gnosis.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
When I believe, I am crazy. When I don't believe, I suffer psychotic depression.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I became a journalist at 17. A few hours later, I saw my first dead body, which was somewhat... colourful. That's when I learned you can go on throwing up after you run out of things to throw up.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The harder I work, the luckier I become.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases - one was Alzheimer's, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer's.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I'm not writing 'The A-Team' - if there's a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer's you are an old fart. That's how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I must have read every issue of 'Punch' published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour - that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like 'Three Men in a Boat.'
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
My advice is this. For Christ's sake, don't write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In 'The Colour of Magic' most of the city is set alight. It's a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams's 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.'
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
In all seriousness, people think that it's the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words - that's how long a novel is.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I've got wide tastes, but I don't like jazz.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The 'New Testament', now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Freedom without limits is just a word.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out til too late that he's been playing with two queens all along.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably 'Doctor Who.' What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It's not morbid to talk about death. Most people don't worry about death, they worry about a bad death.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting 'All the Gods are bastards.'
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: 'Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?'
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possible go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
You can't die with an unfinished book.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I'm a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there's very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in 'I Shall Wear Midnight,' which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they're practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don't fall off. And you try not to use them too often.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate. It's a speech-to-text program, and there's an add-on for talking which some guys came up with.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I'm not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We're not 'celebrities', whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They're what people meet.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people's memories for a while.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I think I work much harder on the children's books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I've never been quite certain why this is.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
If you are going to write, say, fantasy - stop reading fantasy. You've already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you're going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
There are some people who hate my guts. But that goes with the territory.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Seven hundred thousand people who have dementia in this country are not heard. I'm fortunate; I can be heard. Regrettably, it's amazing how people listen if you stand up in public and give away $1 million for research into the disease, as I have done.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn't theirs.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The thing is, 'Discworld' had been going on for a very long time, and I've written children's books as well. Usually when people have a really big series they franchise it, which I thought is a bit of a no-no, so I thought what I'd do is I'd franchise it to myself.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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I grow as many of our vegetables as I can, because my granddad was a professional gardener, and it's in the blood.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I've been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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'Educational' refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
If it wasn't for the fun and money, I really don't know why I'd bother.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It's just a matter of joining the dots.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
'Discworld' is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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I don't really plan. I'm almost intuitive about things.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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As far as I'm concerned, I'm a writer who's writing books, and therefore, I don't want to die. You'd miss the end of the book wouldn't you? You can't die with an unfinished book.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
By the time you've reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I know three people who have got better after a brain tumour. I haven't heard of anyone who's got better from Alzheimer's.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you're hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, 'If wet, in the library.' Who could say that this is bad?
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The bravest person I've ever met was a young boy going through massive amounts of treatment for a very rare, complex and unpleasant disease. I last saw him at a Discworld convention, where he chose to take part in a game as an assassin. He died not long afterwards, and I wish I had his fortitude and sense of style.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I think it does Discworld good if I don't write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about 'Wind in the Willows' and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought - you know about 'The Wind in the Willows.'
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I like being a writer.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I think we are waiting for an e-book that even non-techies can be comfortable with. From my point of view, the biggest change is that I don't have to spend most of the day printing out and packaging a manuscript. I think I almost miss that.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Siren voices tell me, 'You don't have to keep going on.' And then you think, 'I'm a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?' I don't know. I like being a writer.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
'Nation' was one that I'd have killed myself if I hadn't written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Neither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That's something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Christ managed to boil down an awful lot of commandments to a few very simple rules for living. It's when you go backwards through the 'begats' and the Garden of Eden, and you start thinking, 'Hang on, that's a big punishment for eating one lousy apple... There's a human-rights issue.'
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I mean, I wouldn't pay more than a couple of quid to see me, and I'm me.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I'd lay my cards down on that, and say that it's that that I'm trying to do.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
When you read, I'm sure you don't realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don't do that.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
When you're all singing together, it brings things together. I know the songs that my grandfather and my father sang.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it's just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn't the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn't have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I'd got now for an 'adult' DW.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I don't believe in the war god of the Israelites. He's a bogeyman. Jesus preached the golden rule, by and large.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I've got Alzheimer's.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I read the 'Old Testament' all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read 'The Origin Of Species', hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I have, before now, waited for a pen to perform a macro.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I think I would like to go into modelling. Of course, I don't know how to do it, and wouldn't be any good at it if I did, so I'm going to employ someone to walk the catwalks on my behalf. It would still be me, of course.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
You can't remember the plot of the Dr Who movie because it didn't have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together. It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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Sooner or later we're all someone's dog.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I regarded finding I had a form of Alzheimer's as an insult and decided to do my best to marshal any kind of forces I could against this wretched disease. I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer's it's the best form of Alzheimer's to have.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
No one's policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
If the government ever imposes a tax on books - and I wouldn't put it past them - I'm in dead trouble.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
For an author, the nice characters aren't much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They're doing it for themselves.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said - one of the famous lady novelists - 'unhappy is the family that contains an author'?
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called 'The Truth'.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It's useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I've often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
In my heart, I'm just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I'm not a rich man.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Tolkien is eminently filmable, I think. 'The Lord of the Rings' is intensely... landscaped. But 'Discworld' is about dialogue, which is one reason why it might be hard to film.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I have a living will and I have friends, and I have money and I have hope.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I don't think about the end game. I've got lots to occupy my mind. It's the rage that keeps me going.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I was a very keen reader of science fiction.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn't come from a store.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
A person's a person, no matter how small.
 -- Dr. Seuss
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Step with care and great tact, and remember that Life's a Great Balancing Act.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Fun is good.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Adults are obsolete children.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
From there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I'll probably... drop writing children's books and become a political cartoonist again.
 -- Dr. Seuss
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You're never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn't come out right, you've got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
You're in pretty good shape for the shape you are in.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
I've heard there are troubles of more than one kind; some come from ahead, and some come from behind. But I've brought a big bat. I'm all ready, you see; now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Only you can control your future.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
I meant what I said and I said what I meant.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
'The Lorax' book was intended to be propaganda.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it's a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
When at last we are sure, You've been properly pilled, Then a few paper forms, Must be properly filled. So that you and your heirs, May be properly billed.
 -- Dr. Seuss
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Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
I am not a consecutive writer.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Whenever things go a bit sour in a job I'm doing, I always tell myself, 'You can do better than this.'
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
You make 'em, I amuse 'em.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Every once in a while, I get mad. 'The Lorax' came out of my being angry. The ecology books I'd read were dull... In 'The Lorax,' I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Hollywood is not suited for me, and I am not suited for it.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
I was saving the name of 'Geisel' for the Great American Novel.
 -- Dr. Seuss
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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
It is not only the living who are killed in war.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
To insult someone we call him 'bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
I don't expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
It takes more than capital to swing business. You've got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by - Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all time low over the world.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
Man makes holy what he believes.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
God, if there is a God, take my soul, if I have a soul.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
No idea can succeed except at the expense of sacrifice; no one ever escapes without enduring strain from the struggle of life.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
Communism is in conflict with human nature.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
All history is incomprehensible without Christ.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
You may take great comfort from the fact that suffering inwardly for the sake of truth proves abundantly that one loves it and marks one out as being of the elect.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
Blessed are the blind, for they know not enough to ask why.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Humanity, you never had it to begin with.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Never get out of bed before noon.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won't let go.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I used to live on one candy bar a day - it cost a nickel. I always remember the candy bar was called Payday. That was my payday. And that candy bar tasted so good, at night I would take one bite, and it was so beautiful.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you'll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There's nothing to get excited about. They just know. They're saviours.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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When I write, when I'm going hot, I don't want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you're pushing it.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Shakespeare didn't work at all for me.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the 'light' and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don't mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It's the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: 'Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?' They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Sometimes I've called writing a disease. If so, I'm glad that it caught me.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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It's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Much publishing is done through politics, friends, and natural stupidity.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I don't write so much now. I'm getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It's truly ridiculous.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I do not like the human race. I don't like their heads, I don't like their faces, I don't like their feet, I don't like their conversations, I don't like their hairdos, I don't like their automobiles.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I wish being a beekeeper, which I am, gave you a free pass on the carbon footprint, but it doesn't.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I've known ambitious people with no aptitude for the thing they did. Most of whom, rather terrifyingly, tended to succeed.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus?
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Like some kind of particularly tenacious vampire the short story refuses to die, and seems at this point in time to be a wonderful length for our generation.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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What I'd love to do is every now and then go, 'Oh my God, I've got this amazing idea for 'Doctor Who.'
 -- Neil Gaiman
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My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I've never known anyone who was what he or she seemed; or at least, was only what he or she seemed. People carry worlds within them.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn't be a brick wall. So I'd sidle over to the door and I'd pull it open.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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When I started out, there were a lot of things I knew I couldn't do, and a lot of things I only found out I couldn't do by going and doing it. And no-one was watching, and nobody cared.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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As a kid, I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays, and I would walk home at night. For several years, I read the children's library until I finished the children's library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The only people I ever get irritated with are the ones who announce, using my Twitter handle, that they are no longer following me and why.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I don't know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get to see are the flaws.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
I lost some time once. It's always in the last place you look for it.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Make good art.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Also, I've already won all the awards.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf 'cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The biggest difference between England and America is that England has history, while America has geography.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
When you're starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that's gone before and the stuff that's influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that's where you start from.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The current total of countries in the world with First Amendments is one. You have guaranteed freedom of speech. Other countries don't have that.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked... that's the moment you may be starting to get it right.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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It's a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it's not something I find terribly important.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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When I was young, I was reading anything and anything I could lay my hands on. I was a veracious-to-the-point-of-insane reader.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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We all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I'm one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I'm very good at doing that, but I don't like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I was one those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure, I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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In the case of 'Ocean at the End of the Lane,' it's a book about helplessness. It's a book about family, it's a book about being 7 in a world of people who are bigger than you, and more dangerous, and stepping into territory that you don't entirely understand.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I don't think I'm mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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'Doctor Who' was the first mythology that I learned, before ever I ran into Greek or Roman or Egyptian mythologies.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Continuity isn't actually something that I ever worry about. You use it where you need to, and you don't use it where you don't need to.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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'American Gods' was designed to be, if not open-ended, at least a trilogy kind of shape, so there's definitely one more book, probably another couple of books there to get written.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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As an author, I've never forgotten how to daydream.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The joy of doing 'Sandman' was doing a comic and telling people, 'No, it has an end,' at a time when nobody thought you could actually get to the end and stop doing a comic that people were still buying just because you'd finished.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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My stuff gets published in some countries as fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It's just where they think it will do best in the bookshops.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I like reading. I prefer not reading on my computer, because that makes whatever I am reading feel like work. I do not mind reading on my iPad.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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You know, it's weird being interviewed! Because the weird thing about being interviewed is you get asked these questions that you've never thought about, and you find out what you think as you answer.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I'm never, I hope, stupid enough to believe that Twitter or blogging or any of this stuff is a substitute for actually doing the work or writing a book.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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For me, the glory of my first 25 years as a writer was I could put things off as long as I wanted.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Partly because I get such astonishingly nice fans.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I'm sure there are words that are simply in there 'cause I like them. I know I couldn't justify each and every one of them.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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It's a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Oh, tweeting prolifically is the most easy thing in the world. Tweeting prolifically is like somebody saying, 'Boy, you're a really good walker around,' you know. It's not really hard.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The best thing about getting a flu shot is that you never again need to wash your hands. That's how I see it.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that's much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I'm doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I'm not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Nobody's told me anything to date that I've been completely reviled by.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Crap has always happened, crap is happening, and crap will continue to happen.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
For me and my entire generation, we took on this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness because it seemed the most extreme reaction to the earnestness of hippies.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
While writing, I tend to repeat the same song, endlessly, for thousands of times. This helps me ignore any lyrics, and helps create a consistent mood for each book.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I'm trying to make order out of chaos, trying to find some way of rationalising the horrific things that people do or the way the world is.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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We're making the same mistakes we made 1,000 years ago. So they must be the right ones. So relax.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Men are destroyed for being rebellious, and women destroy themselves by failing to be rebellious. Unless you can make that next jump to either getting along with people or resisting people, you are ultimately destroying yourself.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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What we don't understand we can make mean anything.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Men want to make the best use of time and want to see how something can inform them and give them a stronger sense of power.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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You realize you have no control over how you're perceived.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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As we grow older I always think, why didn't I do more when I was young, why didn't I risk more?
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Find out what you're afraid of and go live there.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Masochism is a valuable job skill.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Do you remember when you were 10 or 11 years old and you really thought your folks were the best? They were completely omniscient and you took their word for everything. And then you got older and you went through this hideous age when suddenly they were the devil, they were bullies, and they didn't know anything.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
If we can prove an afterlife, then we have less pressure to make our physical life last forever.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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I believe in something. But I don't believe that anything can hold a grudge for long enough to condemn its creation to eternal punishment. Nobody can hold a grudge that long, even God.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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We don't see a lot of models for male social interaction. There's sports and barn raisings.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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If you flee from the things you fear, there's no resolution.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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As a lower-class kid, I was raised to think success would be owning stuff. Having that great job, too. Now I find my parents' dream was wrong. You never really own anything. And you're never really finished as a person.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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The answer is there is no answer.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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I just don't want to die without a few scars.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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I don't do much more than organise other people's ideas and insights and thoughts, and sort of harvest them, and inventory them and present them.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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I take a lot of flak from the counter-establishment for selling out.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
There will always be an underground.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Any 'artist' makes a living by expressing what others can't - because they're unaware of their feelings, they're too afraid to express those feelings, or they lack the skills to communicate and be understood.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I am the cause of all my upsets. I am my worst enemy.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I like to get people moving and jumping. I think it's good to add more emotion and chaos.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I think America is just so in love with conflict.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I think in a way, you're doomed, once you can envision something. You're sort of doomed to make it happen. I've found that the moment I can envision leaving a relationship, that's usually the moment that the relationship starts to fall apart.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
The first step to eternal life is you have to die.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
One thing I really envy about my friends who have kids is that as their children develop, they're able to revisit their own developmental stages and recognise themselves and undo a lot of things they decided.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
If you don't believe what other people believe, then they'll accuse you of being nihilistic.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Most novels, I find, are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens, and I don't want to waste my time with them.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I've always been very curious about fringe cultures where people temporarily adopt a different social model or way of presenting themselves.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I live by fallacy. 'If I get enough nice Ikea furniture, I'll be a grown-up.' Then I catch myself. Or, 'If I get off by myself, away from the stress of modern life, I'll be OK.' Then I catch myself.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There's a fantastic joy in destroying something that you've meticulously built. Then you're free to build a new thing. Destruction and creation... they're inseparable.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
'Romance' is based on my entire creative process. I fall in love with an idea, obsess over it, isolate myself with it, and when I eventually introduce it to my friends, they all tell me that it's stupid.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Anytime my work can coax bodily fluids out of someone, I'm happy.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I think that I am responsible for the death of thousands of things and for the misery of thousands of people, just through the things that I buy and how I live my life, and these are not things that ever deserved to die.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Few things in life seem more sexy than a banned book.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that's implied before it and the line that's implied after it. Maybe five lines have to do the work of fifty lines.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
In almost all my work, I try to re-invent Christian images and stories and themes. You'd be amazed by the letters I get from young Christians who recognise this and enjoy it.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
At the age of 31, I realized, 'Oh my God, I may die like everyone else.'
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Meeting authors is kind of the death of the characters. That is always heartbreaking.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Verbs allow you to communicate a story in a much more converged or involuntary way for a reader. The verbs allow you to come in under the radar, below people's defenses.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Portland is quickly becoming one of those lovely, lush Third World countries where kinda-rich people retire with their money.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Arguing that God doesn't exist would be like people in the 10th century arguing that germs and microbes didn't exist because they couldn't see them.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers write because they weren't invited to a party.' That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I am enormously uncool. I've made a cottage industry of being uncool. And I'm fine with that.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
David Fincher is a genius.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
My writing process isn't a very organized thing.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge them.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
If there had been zombies on the iceberg when the Titanic hit it, that would have made a much better movie.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I think my heart always goes out to men at the peak of their celebrity who checked out. There's such an odd, horrible trend in my lifetime for it - Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, Alexander McQueen, Heath Ledger.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
My parents divorced about the same time the movie 'The Parent Trap' came out, about two twins at camp who scheme to get their parents back together. I had that same fantasy.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
My favorite books to give or get are short story collections. And always paperbacks because they are easy to carry as you travel.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they'll read my books.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I'm only confrontational with my friends.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
The only thing I shy away from is non-consensual violence. I can't write a story where someone is a simple victim because it's boring.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I don't know if you ever really feel like you've made it.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Every author has to eventually write a food book.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Once religion has been dismissed by primarily an intellectual class of people, we lose the really useful social functions of religion... What replaces it might be worse than what we throw away.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Once I start writing, I can't stop.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
My books are all fantastically sentimental.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Every man's memory is his private literature.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Experience teaches only the teachable.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Dream in a pragmatic way.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The proper study of mankind is books.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The more one judges, the less one loves.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Finance, like time, devours its own children.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Love is the poetry of the senses.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
What is art? Nature concentrated.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Love is a game in which one always cheats.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
There is something great and terrible about suicide.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Those who spend too fast never grow rich.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyment have been intellectual joys.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
  ~ Terry Pratchett, Jingo
%
If you want to conquer fear, don't sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Happiness doesn't depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Today is life-the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today. Get interested in something. Shake yourself awake. Develop a hobby. Let the winds of enthusiasm sweep through you. Live today with gusto.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
When fate hands you a lemon, make lemonade.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Fear doesn't exist anywhere except in the mind.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Instead of worrying about what people say of you, why not spend time trying to accomplish something they will admire.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn't exist anywhere except in the mind.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
If you want to be enthusiastic, act enthusiastic.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The person who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Feeling sorry for yourself, and your present condition, is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The expression a woman wears on her face is far more important than the clothes she wears on her back.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Don't be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are small jobs. Every time you conquer one it makes you that much stronger. If you do the little jobs well, the big ones will tend to take care of themselves.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The royal road to a man's heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Remember happiness doesn't depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Act enthusiastic and you will be enthusiastic.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Do the thing you fear to do and keep on doing it... that is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
We all have possibilities we don't know about. We can do things we don't even dream we can do.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
You never achieve success unless you like what you are doing.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Applause is a receipt, not a bill.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen? Then prepare to accept it. Then proceed to improve on the worst.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
There is only one way... to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Speakers who talk about what life has taught them never fail to keep the attention of their listeners.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
If only the people who worry about their liabilities would think about the riches they do possess, they would stop worrying.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another's keeping .
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism - and wars.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Only the prepared speaker deserves to be confident.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Tell the audience what you're going to say, say it; then tell them what you've said.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
%
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
%
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
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.
 Ursula K. LeGuin
%
We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Volume 1
%
When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
%
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants 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.
 Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
%
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
 Ursula K. LeGuin
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
%
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
%
Nobody who says, I told you so has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
%
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
%
It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
%
But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
%
Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.

The Creation of a
 Ursula K. Le Guin
%
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.
 Ursula K. LeGuin, The Tombs of Atuan
%
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)
 Ursula K. Le Guin
%
I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
 Ursula K LeGuin
%
I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
%
Children know perfectly well that unicorns arent real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
%
Truth is a matter of the imagination.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
%
For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
%
While we read a novel, we are insanebonkers. 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
%
To light a candle is to cast a shadow...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
%
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
 Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
%
There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
%
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
%
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.
 Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
%
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.
 Ursula K. LeGuin, The Farthest Shore
%
I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
%
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
%
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
 ursula le guin
%
If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
%
You cant crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
%
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. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
%
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
%
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. 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, and very often in our art, the art of words.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
%
You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
%
Go to bed; tired is stupid.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
%
Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.
 Ursula K. LeGuin, The Farthest Shore
%
It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.
 Ursula K. LeGuin
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do. . . .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
%
And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet I would remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
%
I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
%
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
%
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
%
Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place.
 Ursula K. LeGuin
%
But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters
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If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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To hear, one must be silent.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Earthsea Trilogy
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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Do you see 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 heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls, the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth an light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale's sounding to the fall of a dry leaf an the gnat's flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole.

But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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A man wants his virility regarded. A woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. [Here] one is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.
 Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Searoad
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No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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.
 Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
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Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. LeGuin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.
 Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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What good is power when you're too wise to use it?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Do you know how to read?"
"No. It is one of the black arts."
He nodded. "But a useful one," he said.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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When we're done with it, we may findif it's a good novelthat 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
 Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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They have nothing to give. They have no power of making. All their power is to darken and destroy. They cannot leave this place; they are this place; and it should be left to them. They should not be denied nor forgotten, but neither should they be worshiped. 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 mens eyes. And where men worship these things and abase themselves before them, there evil breeds; there places are made in the world where darkness gathers, places given over wholly to the Ones whom we call Nameless, the ancient and holy Powers of the Earth before the Light, the powers of the dark, of ruin, of madness I think they drove your priestess Kossil mad a long time ago; I think she has prowled these caverns as she prowls the labyrinth of her own self, and now she cannot see the daylight any more. She tells you that the Nameless Ones are dead; only a lost soul, lost to truth, could believe that. They exist. But they are not your Masters. They never were. You are free, Tenar. You were taught to be a slave, but you have broken free.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.
 Ursula Le Guin
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There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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She'll die.'
'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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.
 Ursula K. Le guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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How does one hate a country, or love one?... 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 a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is the love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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To oppose something is to maintain it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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In war everybody is a prisoner.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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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 maps
And the ways you go be the lines of your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
And 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
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then the next day you probably do much the same againif to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time....

[T]he 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."

"The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
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The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
 Ursula K. LeGuinn
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We men dream dreams, we work magic, we do good, we do evil. The dragons do not dream. They are dreams. They do not work magic: it is their substance, their being. They do not do; they are.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, 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 changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord."

"It might to keep it open.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices
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As a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing,but does only and wholly what he must do...
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Not even need and love can defeat fate...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. ... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, unpredictable, inevitable -- the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?"

That we shall die."

Yes, There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer. ... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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When I'm writing I don't dream much; it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing.
 Ursula K. LeGuin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you loose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."
"That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon-I don't want it! But I am not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely!' I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity."
"It's nothing to do with eternity," said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. "All you have to do to see life as a whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"
"Ah! your talk, your damned philosophy!"
"Talk? It's not talk. It's not reason. It's hand's touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light-"
"Don't be propertarian," Takver muttered.
"Dear heart, don't cry."
"I'm not crying. You are. Those are your tears."
"I'm cold. The moonlight's cold."
"Lie down."
A great shiver went through his body as she took him in her arms.
"I'm afraid, Takver," he whispered.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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 mens eyes.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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To oppose something is to maintain it To be sure, if you turn your back on [something] and walk away from it, you are still on the [same] road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
 Ursula K. LeGuin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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 it--everything 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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The wise needn't ask, the fool asks in vain.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
 Ursula K. LeGuin
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If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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A rock is a good thing, too, you know. If the Isles of Earthsea were all made of diamond, we'd lead a hard life here. Enjoy the illusions, lad, and let the rocks be rocks.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other--outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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We broke the world to make it whole...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants 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. If you cant lick em, join em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Volume 1
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Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction  you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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, mannersalmost 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....
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.
We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la mme chose, plus a change.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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What is a woman's power then?" she asked.
"I don't think we know."
"When has a woman power because she's a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while..."
"In her house, maybe."
She looked around the kitchen. "But the doors are shut," she said, "the doors are locked."
"Because you're valuable."
"Oh yes. We're precious. So long as we're powerless.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
 Ursula K. LeGuin
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There is no kingdom like the forests.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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In many college English courses the words myth and symbol are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just aint no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that thats how Melville did it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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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.

But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking....

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer....The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it.
 Ursula K. Leguin
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I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.
  -- Ursula K Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness
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The light is the left hand of darkness
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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. [...]
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
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Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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For in this love he now felt there was compassion: without which love is untempered, and is not whole, and does not last.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of its existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering - unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Later, when Ged thought back upon that night, he knew that had none touched him when he lay thus spirit-lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet in that wisdom Ged saw something akin to his own power, something that went as deep as wizardry. 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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 traveler may never reach the end of it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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To oppose something is to maintain it.
They say here "all roads lead to Mishnory." To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk in a different road.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?"
"Hah!" went Tenar; and presently, with some cunning, she said, "Haven't there been queens? Weren't they women of power?"
"A queen's only a she-king," said Ged.
She snorted.
"I mean, men give her power. They let her use their power. But it isn't hers, is it? It isn't because she's a woman that she's powerful, but despite it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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Like all walls it was ambiguous, two faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side you were on.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it.
We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
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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.
 Ursula K. LeGuin
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It had never occured to me that thinking and music are so much alike. In fact, you can say music is another way of thinking or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.'
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists relationship is essentially with their work  not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Freedom is never very safe.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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I write with all my heart
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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If you can see a thing whole, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planet,lives...But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Progress means nothing to presence.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
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All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're likewhat's going onwhat 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Fortelling?"
"No..."
"To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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That is between me and my shadow.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Without war there are no heroes."

"What harm would that be?"

"Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness
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For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Anyhow theyre always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Ours is only a little power, seems like, next to theirs," Moss said. "But 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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The machine conceals the machinations.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart
from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from
certain great dominants of our contemporary life -- science, all the sciences,
and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them.
Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an
alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a
metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these
words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used
up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly,
that the truth is a matter of the imagination.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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Time is not duration but intensity; time is the beat and the interval [...]
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
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...[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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wild Girls
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Sometimes a god comes," Selver said. "He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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How do I know," she said at last, "that you are what you seem to be?"
"You don't," Said he. "I don't know what I seem, to you.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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To see a candles light, one must take it into a dark place.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Catwings
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Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants 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. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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Living in a world that is valued only as gain, an ever-expanding world-as-frontier that has no worth of its own, no fullness of its own, you live in danger of losing your own worth to yourself. That's when you begin to listen to the voices from the other side, and to ask questions of failure and the dark.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once its then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalised such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though they can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. Ah, the Night Sea Voyage! we cry, feeling that we have understood something important  but weve merely recognised it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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My race is very old," Ketho said. "We have been civilized for a thousand millenia. We have histories of hundreds of those millenia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else
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At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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What is more arrogant than honesty?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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? The tale tells how the Lords of Manva hunted & gathered roots & cooked their suppers while they were camped in exile in the foothills of Sul, but it doesn't say what their wives & children were living on in their city left ruined & desolate by the enemy. They were finding food too, somehow, cleaning house & honoring the gods, the way we did in the siege & under the tyranny of the Alds. When the heroes came back from the mountain, they were welcomed with a feast. I'd like to know what the food was and how the women managed it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices
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If women had power what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. Chuang Tse: XXIII
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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I dont have a gun and I dont have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after semicolons, and another one after now.

And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences arent. 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 havent done one single thing about it, with a gun or anything.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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I always grow poetic when I am lying to myself.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
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Theres another option. You can consider the reader, not as a helpless victim or a passive consumer, but as an active, intelligent, worthy collaborator. A colluder, a coillusionist.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other's arms, holding love, asleep.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes  the walls, the walls!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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The king was pregnant.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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, wasted 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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They can send death at once, but life is slower...
 Ursula K. Le Guina K. Le Guin, Rocannon's World
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Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices
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Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else
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What is life without incompatible realities?
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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She thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerless. But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Sure, it's simple writing for kidsjust as simple as bringing them up.
 Ursula K. LeGuin
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And heres an example of deliberate violation of a Fake Rule:  Fake Rule: The generic pronoun in English is he. Violation: Each one in turn reads their piece aloud.  This is wrong, say the grammar bullies, because each one, each person is a singular noun and their is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used their with words such as everybody, anybody, a person, and so we all do when were talking. (Its enough to drive anyone out of their senses, said George Bernard Shaw.) The grammarians started telling us it was incorrect along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. That was when they also declared that the pronoun he includes both sexes, as in If a person needs an abortion, he should be required to tell his parents. 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 know what Im doing and why.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
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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 Bookerif more than one woman in ten were to win the Nobel literature prizethe 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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What is evil?" asked the younger man. The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them both. "A web we men weave." Ged answered.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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The trouble is, women have to be absolutely first class to get where third-class men get.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else
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Infinite are the arguments of mages,
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Grain grows best in shit...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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It is the nature of the idea to be communicated, written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass it craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows stronger from being stepped on.
 Ursula Le Guin
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I dont know. Do men kill men, except in madness? Does any beast kill its own kind? Only the insects. These yumens kill us as lightly as we kill snakes. The one who taught me said that they kill one another, in quarrels, and also in groups, like ants fighting. I havent seen that. But I know they dont spare one who asks life. They will strike a bowed neck, I have seen it! There is a wish to kill in them, and therefore I saw fit to put them to death.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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The prisoner is the jailer's jailer.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Rocannon's World
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We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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They were without shame and without desire, like the angels. But it is not human to be without shame and without desire.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Estraven stood there in harness beside me looking at that magnificent and unspeakable desolation. 'I'm glad I have lived to see this,' he said.

I have felt as he did. It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. we believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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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. I'm not sure of the nature of my existence, and wonder to find myself writing.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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Excerpt from  -- Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards

Hard times are coming, when well 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. Well need writers who can remember freedom  poets, visionaries  realists of a larger reality.
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 maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this  letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books arent just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable  but 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.
Ive had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I dont want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isnt profit. Its name is freedom.
  -- Ursula K Le Guin
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Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else
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Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
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An enemy, in Karhide, is not a stranger, an invader. The stranger who comes unknown is a guest. Your enemy is your neighbor.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there's more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model... So I was sent alone, for your sake? Or for my own? I don't know. Yes, it has made things difficult.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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In Enlad," said Arren after a while, "we have a story about the boy whose schoolmaster
was a stone:'
"Aye?... What did he learn?"
"Not to ask questions.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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The Owl thinks slowly, but the Owl thinks long.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Catwings
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If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?...I mean, men give her [a queen] power. They let her use their power. But it isn't hers, is it? It isn't because she's a woman that she's powerful, but despite it.
 Ursula K. Leguin
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I am tired of safe places, and roofs, and walls around me.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I tried to speak insipidly, yet everything I said seemed to take on a double meaning.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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But he had not brought anything. His hands were empty, as they had always been.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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But when we crave power over lifeendless wealth, unassailable safety, immortalitythen 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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A lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their children enjoyed my books but of course they never read them, and people who make sure I know they dont read that space-ship stuff. No, no, they read Literaturerealism. Like The Help, or Fifty Shades of Grey.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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A decision worthy of the name is based on observation, factual information, intellectual and ethical judgment. Opinionthat darling of the press, the politician, and the pollmay be based on no information at all.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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He was very weary; the day had been long, and full of dragons.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Her despair grew so great that it burst her breast open and like a bird of fire shattered the stone and broke out into the light of day--the light of day, faint in her windowless room.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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You have nothing. You posses nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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There are talking dogs all over the place, unbelievably boring they are, on and on and on about sex and shit and smells, and smells and shit and sex, and do you love me, do you love me, do you love me.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Ai was exhausted and enraged. He looked ready to cry, but did not. I believe he considers crying either evil or shameful. Even when he was very ill and weak, the first days of our escape, he hid his face from me when he wept. Reasons personal, racial, social, sexual  how can I guess why Ai must not weep?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I was with you at the beginning of your journey. It is right that I should follow you to its end.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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As for ideology, the Hell with it.
All of it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire willpower, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Whatever language we speak, before we begin a sentence we have an almost infinite choice of words to use. A, The, They, Whereas, Having, Then, To, Bison, Ignorant, Since, Winnemucca, In, It, As . . . Any word of the immense vocabulary of English may begin an English sentence. As we speak or write the sentence, each word influences the choice of the next  its syntactical function as noun, verb, adjective, etc., its person and number if a pronoun, its tense and number as a verb, etc. ,etc. And as the sentence goes on, the choices narrow, until the last word may very likely be the only one we can use.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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It appears that we've given up on the long-range view. That we've decided not to think about consequencesabout cause and effect. Maybe that's why I feel that I live in exile. I used to live in a country that had a future.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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You always have to defend the imagination against idiots.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character  not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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...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 are false, and it is all one story.
 Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I think we all have archipelagoes in our minds.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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... Dangerous! Vea laughed radiantly. What an utterly marvellous compliment! Why am I dangerous, Shevek?
Why, because you know that in the eyes of men you are a thing, a thing owned, bought, sold. And so you think only of tricking the owners, of getting revenge ...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing but does only and wholly what he must do.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldnt be given, wouldnt be taken, but chose my man and my fate.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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. Its worth it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
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On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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...You have knowledge, and I have skill, and between us we have..."
"We have the Ring of Erreth-Akbe."
"Yes, that. But I thought also of another thing between us. Call it trust... That is one of its names. It is a very great thing. Though each of us alone is weak, having that we are strong, stronger than the Powers of the Dark.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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but you're not a traitor, you've merely been the tool of one. I don't punish tools. They do harm only in the hands of a bad workman.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else
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His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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I hope youll 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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There must be darkness to see the stars.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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The novelist's business is lying.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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 ones own name written in a strange alphabet and recognizing it, I say it: the heron.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Searoad
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Aeneas' mother is a star?"

"No; a goddess."

I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus."

He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. "So do we, he said. "But Venus also became more...With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite...There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light..."

It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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I never thought before," said Tirin unruffled, "of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, 'Look there's the Moon.' Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth."
"Where, then, is Truth?" declaimed Bedap, and yawned.
"In the hill one happens to be sitting on," said Tirin.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrdinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future - indeed Schrdinger most famous thought experiment goes to show that the "future," on the quantum level, cannot be predicted - but to describe reality, the present world.
Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore mor honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore mor honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you cant step into the same river twice. Life  evolution  the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy  existence itself  is essentially change.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Fish and visitors stink after three days.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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, and that if theses faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years, she read, and on Gethen there has never been a war." She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly. "There has never been a war." In her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief. So as the cloud-shadows swept over the marshes and the page of the book open on her lap, she sighed and closed her eyes. thinking, "I am a liar." Then she opened her eyes and read more about the other worlds, the far realities.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven / The Dispossessed / The Wind's Twelve Quarters
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The beauty ideal is always a youthful one. This is partly simple realism. The young are beautiful. The whole lot of em. The older I get, the more clearly I see that and enjoy it. But it gets harder and harder to enjoy facing the mirror. Who is that old lady? Where is her waist? I got resigned, sort of, to losing my dark hair and getting all this limp grey stuff instead, but now am I going to lose even that and end up all pink scalp? I mean, enough already. Is that another mole or am I turning into an Appaloosa? How large can a knuckle get before it becomes a kneejoint? I dont want to see, I dont want to know. And yet I look at men and women my age and older, and their scalps and knuckles and spots and bulges, though various and interesting, dont affect what I think of them. Some of these people I consider to be very beautiful, and others I dont. For old people, beauty doesnt come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 20002016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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... there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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She said it seemed like the only choices offered were to want to be what other people were, or to be what other people wanted you to be.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else
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Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky. The Creation of a
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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It was more than dignity. 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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A wizards 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...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Had his fear, in fact, been the personal fear that Selver might having learnt the racial hatred, reject him and treat him not as you but as one of them.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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You're a respectable woman, dearie, and her reputation is a woman's wealth."
"Her wealth," Tenar repeated in the same blank way; then she said it again: "Her wealth. Her treasure. Her hoard. Her value...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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What books didnt influence me? If only someone would ask that! Ive been waiting for years to answer it. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, I will say, had absolutely no influence on me except to cause hours of incredulous boredom.
 Ursula LeGuin
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Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things, there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them, too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there are seeds to be gathered and room in the bag of stars.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Even the best weapon is an unhappy tool, hateful to living things. So the follower of the Way stays away from it. Weapons are unhappy tools, not chosen by thoughtful people, to be used only when there is no choice, and with a calm, still mind, without enjoyment. To enjoy using weapons is to enjoy killing people, and to enjoy killing people is to lose your share in the common good. It is right that the murder of many people be mourned and lamented. It is right that a victor in war be received with funeral ceremonies.
  -- Ursula K Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The habit of silence is lead on the tongue.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
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The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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I was in too much haste, and now have no time left.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can seperate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance thats already between us, the distance of our sex, the differance of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, he comes back
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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I prefer to save talking till I know what Im talking about.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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Master, said Ged, I cannot take your name from you, not being strong enough, and I cannot trick your name from you, not being wise enough. So I am content to stay here, and learn or serve, whatever you will: unless by chance you will answer a question I have.

Ask it.

What is your name?

The doorkeeper smiled, and said his name; and Ged, repeating it, entered for the last time into that House.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Id rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer,
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
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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 names--Mars 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
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Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
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Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won't talk about anything except the injustice of the United States income tax structure toward people with fluctuating income, or how to breed Black Angus cows, or something.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women dont have to learn.

Vokep shook his head grimly. Its the kids, he said. Having babies. Makes em propertarians. They wont let go. He sighed. Touch and go, brother, thats the rule. Dont ever let yourself be owned.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Let age be age. Let your old relative or old friend be who they are. Denial serves nothing, no one, no purpose.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of ones function in the sociopolitical whole.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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The first thing I can remember clearly is writing the way into the secret room.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices
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They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I dont believe in Darwins theory of evolution. I accept it. It isnt a matter of faith, but of evidence.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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You have not thought things through, he said. By his standards it was a brutal insult.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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a book is a box of words until you open it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Students are intense people, they laugh and cry, they break down and rebuild.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
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A grating sound came from the dragon's throat . . . "You offer me safety! You threaten me! With what?"

"With your name, Yevaud.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 20002016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Owning is owing, having is hoarding.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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Not all roads that lead down lead up as well.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Rocannon's World
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The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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A man gives out, dearie. A woman takes in.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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If we hide, Therru, we feed him. We will eat. And we will starve him. Come with me.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered all in one moment with its roots in his loins and its flowers in his mind.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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On top of pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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No, brother, I'm sane. What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain- you said that! But it's the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy. It's the lies that make you want to kill yourself.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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This concern, feebly called '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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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There are men right now who have never learned how to talk to women. How will we talk to somebody really different  aliens?
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Old age generally involves pain and danger and inevitably ends in death. The acceptance of that takes courage. Courage deserves respect.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it - because they're afraid of it. They're afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they'll have to redefine what literature is. And they're too damned lazy to do it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains... and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. "You call that organization?" he had inquired. "You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency--a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?" This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerrillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. "But that only works when the people think they're fighting for something of their own--you know, their homes, or some notion or other," the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the Army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Karhiders discuss sexual matters freely, and talk about kemmer with both reverence and gusto, but they are reticent about discussing perversion - at least they were with me. Excessive prolongation of the kemmer period, with permanent hormonal imbalance toward the male or the female, causes what they call perversion; it is not rare; three or four percent of adults may be physiological perverts or abnormals - normals, by our standard. They are not excluded from society, but they are tolerated with some disdain, as homosexuals are in many bisexual societies, the Karhidish slang for them is halfdeads. They are sterile.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Meaning in art isnt the same as meaning in science. The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isnt changed by who reads it, or when, or where. The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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...I wore his blood for clothing, on my legs and thighs and hands: a dry, stiff, brown garment with no warmth in it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
I am tired, he said. I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire will power, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button.

You have lived well, the Alien said.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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When all ways are lost the way is clear.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Orr had a tendency to assume that people knew what they were doing, perhaps because he generally assumed that he did not.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Meaning - this is perhaps the common note, the bane I am seeking. What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story ... ? Tell me what it Means.

But that is not my job, honey. That's your job.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Praise God from whom all blessings flow, including good-natured men.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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 werent about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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...talk is an art and a pleasure, not a matter of mere use and need.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
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They made love. Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other's arms, holding love, asleep.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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 Its 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the 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. It is a boxUrras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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But even the most unmissionary soul, unless he pretend he has no emotions, is sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. 'What are they doing?' abruptly becomes, 'What are we doing?' and then, 'What must I do?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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The most winning characteristic of the rather harsh Cetian temperament was curiosity, inopportune, and inexhaustible curiosity; Cetians died eagerly, curious as to what came next.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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We demand a rebellious spirit of those who have no chance to learn that rebellion is possible, but we the privileged hold still and see no evil.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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The life of every man is in the Center of Time, for all were seen in the seeing of Meshe, and are in his eye. We are the pupils of his Eye... Our doing is his Seeing: our being is his Knowing.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters
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 'Banished men should never speak their native tongue; it comes bitter from their mouth. And this language suits a traitor better, I think; drips off one's teeth like sugar-syrup.'
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for lifes sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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I dont like making the rest of the world live in my dreams, but I certainly dont want to live in yours.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness
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Opinion all too often leaves no room for anything but itself.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?'
...'Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
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It is very seldom, the young man said at last, that dragons ask to do men favours.
But it is very common, said the dragon, for cats to play with mice before they kill them.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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There's a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It's like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.'
She spoke if in trance, rapture. Manan watched her. His slabby face never expressed much but stolid, careful sadness; it was sadder than usual now. 'Well, and you're mistress of all that,' he said. 'The silence, and the dark.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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But I think we will have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round an round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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True voyage is return.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
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If you can't lick'em, join'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight , to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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So the unwanting soul
sees whats hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
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Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask."

"But you're the Answerers!"

"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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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But she knew, though very vaguely, that she was crying, because hope hurts terribly when it breaks through the resignation in which you have lived for days.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Planet of Exile / Mankind Under the Leash
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Btn duvarlar gibi iki anlaml, iki yzlyd. Neyin ieride, neyin darda olduu, duvarn hangi yanndan baktnza balyd.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Dragons think we are amusing. But they remember Erreth-Akbe. They speak of him as if he were a dragon, not a man.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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I only ask your help, for which I have nothing to give in return."

"Nothing? You call your theory nothing"

"Weigh it in the balance with the freedom of one single human spirit," he said, turning to her, "and which will weigh heavier? Can you tell? I cannot.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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He was born to be alone, a damned cold intellectual, an egoist.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Where does your soul go when you die in Hell?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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...close up, a world's all dirt and rocks... 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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If Im ninety and believe Im forty-five, Im headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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For heroes do not make historythat is the historians jobbut, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales
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If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even.
 Ursula K. Le Guina
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I know that many men and even women are afraid and angry when women do speak, because in this barbaric society, when women speak truly they speak subversively - they can't help it: if you're underneath, if you're kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

That's what I want - to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don't know the power in you - I want to hear you.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Hard times are coming, when well 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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The heavy work requiring muscle and the skilled work with crops and sheep was done by Ged, Shandy, and Tenar, while the two old men who had been there all their lives, his father's men took him about and told him how they managed it all, and truly believed they were managing it all, and shared their believe with him.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based
on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God
there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that
there is a God, there would be no religion
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no act or art or power can teach me, what I have never learned.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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The social function of narrative is not limited to 'primitive' people sitting around the fire telling each other where Fire came from and why they're sitting around it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I tried to think about what he had asked me to do, to step so far beyond myself. I found it difficult to think about. It was as if it hung over me, this huge choice I must make, this future I could not imagine.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Unlocking the Air and Other Stories
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The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper. In other words, that she's free. Not wholly free. Never wholly free. Maybe very partially. Maybe only in this one act, this sitting for a snatched moment being a woman writing, fishing the mind's lake. But in this, responsible; in this autonomous; in this free.

(- from The Fisherwoman's Daughter)
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
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Can you walk the road your dream goes?
Sometimes. Sometimes I am afraid to.
Who is not.
...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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It's your nature to be Tirin, and my nature to be Shevek, and our common nature to be Odonians, responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our freedom. To avoid it, would be to lose our freedom. 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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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There's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
%
She could not have been born gray. Her
color, 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 mixed
nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people's world. She had not been born.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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Am I supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After all, he's just a man ... He's about fifty years old, and he's bald. And I'll bet he has to cut his toenails too like any other man. I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is, he'll be much godlier after he's dead.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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Who do you think is lying to us? Shevek demanded.
Placid, Bedap met his gaze. Who, brother? Who but ourselves?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right nowand right now some man or woman is writing a new one we wont know we needed till we read it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
%
Judgement is poverty.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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I saw that you cant do anything for anybody. We cant save each other. Or ourselves.

What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You're denying brotherhood, Shevek! the tall girl cried.

Nono, Im not. Im trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It beginsit begins in shared pain.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness
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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 hungers sake. Yarrow, your little dragon has stolen a cake.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
%
Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. {...} But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
%
What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we have is here, now.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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It isn't changing around from place to place that keeps you lively. It's getting time on your side. Working with it, not against it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
%
Man's singularity is his divinity.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination. I
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization. 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
We are all contingent. Resentment is foolish and ungenerous, and even anger is inadequate. I am a fleck of light on the surface of the sea, a glint of light from the evening star. I live in awe. If I never lived at all, yet I am a silent wing on the wind, a bodiless voice in the forest of Albunea. I speak, but all I can say is: Go, go on.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
%
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
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 generations part, not this one's; they wove the links men saw as chains, the bonds men saw as bondage.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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A library is a focal point, a sacred place to a community; and its sacredness is its accessibility, its publicness. Its everybodys place".
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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we must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice we must not act without. Who am i-though i have the power to do it- to punish and reward, playing with men's destinies?
 Le Guin, Ursula K.
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The Sun Going South

In 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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It exists, Shevek said, spreading out his hands. Its real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I cant pretend that it doesnt exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course its right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We cant prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, well have known pain for fifty years. And in the end well die. Thats the condition were born on. Im afraid of life! There are times II am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isnt all a misunderstandingthis grasping after happiness, this fear of pain.... If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could ... get through it, go beyond it There is something beyond it. Its the self that suffers, and theres a place where the selfceases. I dont know how to say it. But I believe that the realitythe truth that I recognize in suffering as I dont in comfort and happinessthat the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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They way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn't very different from what historians of the so-called real world do. Even if we are present at some historic event, so we comprehend it - can we even remember it - until we can tell it as a story? And for events in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it's then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty. If we let it drop from memory, only imagination can restore the least glimmer of it. If we lie about the past, forcing it to tell a story we want it to tell, to mean what we want it to mean, it loses its reality, becomes a fake. To bring the past along with us through time in the hold-alls of myth and history is a heavy undertaking; but as Lao Tzu says, wise people march along with the baggage wagons.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?
 Leguin, Ursula
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It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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The art of one's own time tends to be formidable . . . because we have to learn how and where to take hold of it, what response is being asked of us, before we can get involved. It's truly new, and therefore truly a bit frightening.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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A people that doesn't live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and storytellers, is in a bad way. The center of the world is where you live fully, where you know how things are done, how things are done rightly, done well.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 20002016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
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And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do....
  -- Ursula K Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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The really terrible thing about being young is the triviality
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else
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Ged saw all these things from outside and apart, alone, and his heart was very heavy in him, though he would not admit to himself that he was sad. As night fell he still lingered in the streets, reluctant to go back to the inn. He heard a man and a girl talking together merrily as they came down the street past him towards the town square, and all at once he turned, for he knew the man's voice.

He followed and caught up with the pair, coming up beside them in the late twilight lit only by distant lantern-gleams. The girl stepped back, but the man stared at him and then flung up the staff he carried, holding it between them as a barrier to ward off the threat or act of evil. And that was somewhat more than Ged could bear. His voice shook a little as he said, "I thought you would know me, Vetch."

Even then Vetch hesitated for a moment.

"I do know you," he said, and lowered the staff and took Ged's hand and hugged him round the shoulders-" I do know you! Welcome, my friend, welcome! What a sorry greeting I gave you, as if you were a ghost coming up from behind and I have waited for you to come, and looked for you-
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Well," he said slowly, "sometimes there's a passion that comes in its springtime to ill fate or death. And because it ends in its beauty, it's what the harpers sing of and the poets make stories of: the love that escapes the years....

"All or nothing, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Late in the Day: Poems 20102014
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. . . 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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An artist makes the world her world. An artist makes her world the world. For a little while. For as long as it takes to look at or listen or to watch or read the work of art. Like a crystal, the work of art seems to contain the whole, and to imply eternity.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
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I bid your voice be dumb until the day you find a word worth speaking.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.

Its found on Earth, and on Hain-Davenant, and on Chiffewar. It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darknesshow did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The presence of females was oppressive to them all. It seemed to them that lately the world was full of girls. Everywhere they looked, waking or asleep, they saw giris. They had all tried copulating with girls; some of
them in despair had also tried not copulating with girls. It made no difference. The girls were there.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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That sacrificiality was what Takver had spoken of recognizing in herself when she was pregnant, and she had spoken with a degree of horror, of self-disgust, because she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and ends was, to her too, false. For her as for him, there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration.

So his mutual commitment to Takver, their relationship, had remained thoroughly alive during their four years separation. They had both suffered from it, and suffered a good deal, but it had not occurred to either of them to escape the suffering by denying the commitment.

For after all, he thought now, lying in the warmth of Takvers sleep, it was joy they were both after  the completeness of being. If you evade the suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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I think most women marry to get their freedom."

"Then they want less than I do. Theres something inside me, in my heart, a brightness and a heaviness, how can I describe it? Something that exists and does not yet exist, which is mine to carry, and not mine to give up to any man.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales
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This writing doesn't affect reality any more than any writing does; that is to say, indirectly, but considerably.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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Question 14: Are you living your secret desires? Floored again. I finally didnt check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in I have none, my desires are flagrant.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Why is it that if you say you dont enjoy using an e-reader, or that you arent 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 Ive 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.
  -- Ursula K Le Guin
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They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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For to keep dark the mind of the mageborn, that is a dangerous thing.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, weve sacrificed right to might. (Thats what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, weve left the real world, were in fantasy landwishful thinking country.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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the Old Powers of earth are not for men to use. They were never given into our hands, and in our hands they work only ruin. Ill means, ill end. I was not drawn here, but driven here, and the force that drove me works to my undoing.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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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, visionariesthe realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings.  Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our artthe art of words. Ive had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really dont want to watch American literature get sold down the river.  The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.
 Ursula Le Guin
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Words are my mattermy stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Laws are made against the impulse a people most fears in itself. Do not kill was the Shing's vaunted single Law. All else was permitted: which meant, perhaps, there was little else they really wanted to do...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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We are not seeking power. We are seeking the end of power! ... The means are the end. ... Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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No, I don't understand him, but he is worth listening to.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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I want to say to the literature teacher who remains wilfully, even boastfully ignorant of a major element of contemporary fiction: you are incompetent to teach or judge your subject. Readers and students who do know the field, meanwhile, have every right to challenge your ignorant prejudice. Rise, undergraduates of the English departments! You have nothing to lose but your A on the midterm!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Secret History of Fantasy
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The tree said in its rooted being, All my leaves are seen, but one, this one in the darkness cast by all the others. This one leaf I keep secret to myself. Who will see it in the darkness of my leaves? And who will count the number of them?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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cats have no guilt and very little shame.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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They tended to be stolid, slovenly, heavy, and to my eyes effeminate - not in the sense of delicacy, etc., but in just the opposite sense: a gross, bland fleshiness, a bovinity without point or edge.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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 be--psychologically 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading." -- "On Despising Genres," essay
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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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 sharecroppers 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Arren was silent, pondering this. Presently the mage said, speaking softly, 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 thats the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed. On every act the Balance of the Whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whales sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnats flight, all they do is done within the Balance of the Whole. But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the Balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility. Who am Ithough I have the power to do itto punish and reward, playing with mens destinies? But then, the boy said, frowning at the stars, is the Balance to be kept by doing nothing? Surely a man must act, even not knowing all the consequences of his act, if anything is to be done at all? Never fear. It is much easier for men to act than to refrain from acting. We will continue to do good and to do evil.... But if there were a king over us all again and he sought counsel of a mage, as in the days of old, and I were that mage, I would say to him: My lord, do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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I've been looking only at what's to be done next and forgetting why we're doing it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self - ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality, the truth which I recognise in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness - that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
 Ursula Le Guin
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Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird feeder.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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...All who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You lost death, you lost life, in order to save yourself. Yourself! Your immortal self! What is it? Who are you?"
"I am myself. My body will not decay and die-"
"A living body suffers pain, Cob; a living body grows old; it dies. Death is the price we pay for our life and for all life."
"I do not pay it! I can die and in that moment live again! I cannot be killed; I am immortal. I alone am myself forever!"
"Who are you, then?"
"The Immortal One."
"Say your name."
"The King."
"Say my name. I told it to you but a minute since. Say my name!"
"You are not real. You have no name. Only I exist."
"You exist: without name, without form. You cannot see the light of day; you cannot see the dark. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no self. All that which you sold, that is yourself. You have given everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw your world to you, all that light and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be filled. Not all the songs of earth, not all the stars of heaven, could fill your emptiness.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Karde bile rahatlatamaz insan kt saatte, karanlkta, duvarn dibinde.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Literature is a field a great many men consider theirs by right. Virginia Woolf committed successful competition in that field. She barely escaped the first and most effective punishment--omission from the literary canon after her death. Yet eighty or ninety years later charges of snobbery and invalidism are still used to discredit and diminish her. Marcel Proust's limitations and his neuroticism were at least as notable as hers. But that Proust needed not only a room of his own but a cork-lined one is taken as proof he was a genius. That Woolf heard the birds singing in Greek shows only that she was a sick woman.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Orr was not a fast reasoner. In fact, he was not a reasoner. He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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The offer of a generous spirit is not one to refuse lightly.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
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The room smelled of books, that subtle smell which to some is stuffy and to others intoxicating, and it was silent.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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They praised his modesty and did not listen to him, for listening is a rare gift, and men will have their heroes.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Earthsea Trilogy
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I never knew anybody, anywhere I have been, who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth, from orbit.
 Ursula LeGuin
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Boris Pasternak said that poetry makes itself from the relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
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Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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He was clearly aware of only one thing, his own total isolation. The world had fallen out from under him, and he was left alone.

To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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. Shevs right, he said. Loves just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we dont have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Oh, Hank," Susan whispered, "their wings are furry."

"Oh, James," Harriet whispered, "their hands are kind.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Catwings
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An Odonians goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially its merely destructive.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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In innocence there is no strength against evil [...] but there is strength in it for good.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.
 Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.
The value judgement concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction.
Every readable novel can give true pleasure. Every novel read by choice is read because it gives true pleasure.
Literature consists of many genres, including mystery, science fiction, fantasy, naturalism, realism, magical realism, graphic, erotic, experimental, psychological, social, political, historical, bildungsroman, romance, western, army life, young adult, thriller, etc., etc. and the proliferating cross-species and subgenres such as erotic Regency, noir police procedural, or historical thriller with zombies.
Some of these categories are descriptive, some are maintained largely as marketing devices. Some are old, some new, some ephemeral.
Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood: but no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior.

(Hypothesis on Literature vs. Genre)
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Tenar, I go where I am sent. I follow my calling. It has not yet let me stay in any land for long. Do you see that? I do what I must do. Where I go, I must go alone. So long as you need me, Ill be with you in Havnor. And if you ever need me again, call me. I will come. I would come from my grave if you called me, Tenar! But I cannot stay with you.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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...There's no right answer
to the wrong question.
Now what do we do?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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Farkl gnelerin klar farkldr, ama tek bir karanlk vardr.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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None of this is spare time. I cant spare it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Her ey konuur; duymak istiyorsan, sessiz ol...
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I never had a gift but one, to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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It was the idea of writing with a specific audience in mind or a specific age of reader that scared me off.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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You must be Arha, or you must be Tenar. You cannot be both.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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."

-Hawk
Who had been Archmage
The Other Wind
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Were in the world, not against it. It doesnt work to try to stand outside things and run them that way. It just doesnt 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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 Darwins intellect directly expressed in the clarity, strength, and vitality of his writing  the beauty of it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 20002016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
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Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didnt know how to sell the product.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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Perhaps women have more complicated selves. They know how to do more than one thing at one time. That comes late to men. If at all.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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They have no gods. They work magic, and think they are gods themselves. But they are not. And when they die, they (...) become dust and bone, and their ghosts whine on the wind a little while till the wind blows them away. They do not have immortal souls.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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They exist. But they are not your Masters. They never were. You are free, Tenar. You were taught to be a slave, but you have broken free.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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it is as if i were dead, and this is the after-life, her in the sunlight, beyond the edge of the world, among the sons and daughters of the sea.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Beginning Place
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What a comfort the past is," Mimen said, "when the future offers none.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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Our souls are old,
often used before.
The knife outlasts
the hand that holds it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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Hideo," said my mother, in the terrifying way women have of passing without interval from one subject to another because they have them all present in their mind at once, "you haven't found any kind of relationship?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
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I hate complaining to strangers -- you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness
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Sairin bana siirinde okudugu Troya'nin dususu hikayesinde kralin kizi Cassandra olacaklari onceden goruyor ve Troyallarn buyuk at sehre sokmalarn onlemeye calisiyor, ama onu kimse dinlemiyordu: Uzerrindeki lanetti bu, hakikati gorecek, bunu soyleyecek, ama onu kimse duymayacakt. Erkeklerden ziyade kadinlarin uzerindeki bir lannetir bu. Erkekler hakikatin kendilerine ait olmasini, kendi kesifleri, kendi mulkleri olmasini ister.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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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 textcompulsive page-turner, gut-wrenching, jolting, mind-searing, heart-stoppingwhat is this, electroshock torture?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
names the mother
of the ten thousand things.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
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You cant crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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They let us be, here, in the cage of our ignorance.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isnt the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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There was something lacking  in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not strong enough to take what was so generously offered. He felt himself dry and arid, like a desert plant, in this beautiful oasis. Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off his soul; the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could not drink.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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Old age isnt a state of mind. Its an existential situation.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Conheo pessoas, conheo cidades, fazendas, montanhas, rios e rochas; sei como sol poente de outono se esparrama pela face de um certo tipo de terra arada; mas qual o sentido de impor uma fronteira a isso tudo, dar-lhe um nome e deixar de amar o lugar onde o nome no se aplica? O que  o amor pelo seu pas?  o dio pelo seu no-pas? Ento no  uma coisa boa.  apenas amor-prprio? Isso  bom, mas no se deve fazer dele uma virtude ou uma profisso de f. Na mesma medida que amo a vida, amo as montanhas, mas esse amor no tem uma fronteira traada pelo dio."

Ursula K. Le Guin, no timo "A Mo Esquerda da Escurido".
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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We werent cruel, we were ignorant, foolish. Children are ignorant and foolish. But they learn. If they are given a chance to learn.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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Large, general questions about meaning, etc., can only be answered with generalities, which make me uncomfortable, because it is so hard to be honest when you generalize. If you skip over all the details, how can you tell if you're being honest or not?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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To be whole is to be part;
true voyage is return.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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What is fantasy? On one level, of course, it is a game: a pure pretense with no ulterior motive whatever. It is one child saying to another child, Lets be dragons, and then theyre dragons for an hour or two. It is escapism of the most admirable kindthe game played for the games sake.
On another level, it is still a game, but a game played for very high stakes. Seen thus, as art, not spontaneous play, its affinity is not with daydream, but with dream. It is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational but pararational not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freuds terminology, it employs primary, not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes, which, Jung warned us, are dangerous things. 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. And their guides, the writers of fantasy, should take their responsibilities seriously.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Between a man and a woman there is what they want there to be between them... each, and both.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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To light a candle is to cast a shadow . . .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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There was no more room in the world for whole people, they took up too much space. What she had done to him was only a part of the general program for cutting him and people like him down to size, for chopping and paring and breaking up, so that in the texture of life nothing large, nothing hard, nothing grand should remain.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales
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Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: the refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can lick them, join them. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to loose hold of everything else.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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-,      ,   ,       ,   ,         ,      .    ,    ,     ,    .            ,     .     ,    ,         ,   .         ,           ,    ,     .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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You can keep up that crap for years. But it finally catches up with you. And then you realise all you've done is save your shit to drown in.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth
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Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work. The judgment that a work is completethis is what I meant to do, and I stand by itcan come only from the writer, and it can be made rightly only by a writer whos learned to read her own work. Group criticism is great training for self-criticism. But until quite recently no writer had that training, and yet they learned what they needed. They learned it by doing it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
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The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I supposed?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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The revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We can't stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Ai taught me a Terran game played on squares with little stones, called go, an excellent difficult game.
 Ursula K. LeGuin
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There are a limited number of plots (some say seven, some say twelve, some say thirty). There is no limit to the number of stories.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
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For they were alone, and he was one of the seven persons in the world who knew the Archmage's name. The others were the Master Namer of Roke; and Ogion the Silent, the wizard of Re Albi, who long ago on the mountain of Gont had given Ged that name; and the White Lady of Gont, Tenar of the Ring; and a village wizard in Iffish called Vetch; and in Iffish again, a house-carpenter's wife, mother of three girls, ignorant of all sorcery but wise in other things, who was called Yarrow; and finally, on the other side of Earthsea, in the farthest west, two dragons: Orm Embar and Kalessin.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises, and how a real love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Eye of the Heron
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A man who doesnt detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government in earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I did not deliberately invent Earthsea, I did not think Hey wow  islands are archetypes and archipelagoes are superarchetypes and lets build us an archipelago! I am not an engineer, but an explorer. I discovered Earthsea.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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The premise is: everybody's like me and we all think alike.
The corollary is: people who don't think like me don't matter.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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I came to the center of the maze following him. Now I must find my way back out alone.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Hemos llegado, desde una gran distancia el uno al otro. Siempre lo hemos hecho. A travs de grandes distancias, a travs de aos, a travs de abismos de casualidad. Porque l viene de tan lejos, nada puede separarnos. Nada, ni la distancia, ni los aos, puede ser ms grande que la distancia que siempre estuvo entre nosotros, la distancia de nuestro sexo, la diferencia de nuestro ser, la de nuestras mentes; esa brecha, ese abismo que salvamos con una mirada, un roce, una palabra, la cosa ms simple del mundo. Mira lo lejos que est, dormido. Mira lo lejos que est, lo lejos que est siempre. Pero vuelve, vuelve, vuelve...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Vermediiniz eyi alamazsnz, kendinizi vermeniz gerekir. Devrim'i satn alamazsnz. Devrim'i yapamazsnz. Devrim olabilirsiniz ancak.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game...speak the truth and hear the truth.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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Why must there be war?" "Oh Lavinia, what a woman's question that is! Because men are men.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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The Encyclopedia Planaria, in forty-four volumes, is not portable, and after all, what is entirely reliable unless it's dead?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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And yet, I wonder if it isnt all a misunderstandingthis grasping after happiness, this fear of pain.... If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could ... get through it, go beyond it There is something beyond it. Its the self that suffers, and theres a place where the selfceases. I dont know how to say it. But I believe that the realitythe truth that I recognize in suffering as I dont in comfort and happinessthat the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Well, this. That were ashamed to say weve refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We dont cooperate  we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbors opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You dont believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why hes a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminal! 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. Weve made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we cant see them, because theyre part of our thinking. Tir never did that I knew him since we were ten years old. He never did it, he never could build walls. He was a natural rebel. He was a natural Odonian  a real one! He was a free man, and the rest of us, his brothers, drove him insane in punishment for his first free act.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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There was room for them. A great deal of Italy, back then, was forest. Where man goes, trees die; or, to paraphrase Tacitus, we make a desert and call it progress.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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 ,  ,  !          .    ,    .  ,   -       .      .  ,  .            .  !
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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Tezyeme," he said, which meant something on the order of "it is happening the way it is supposed to happen.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Planet of Exile
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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Page 15, paperback version by Virago Press 1997:
... Let me ask you this, Mr Ai: do you know, by your own experience, what patriotism is?
No, I said, shaken by the force of the intese personality suddenly turning itself wholly upon me. I dont think I do. If by patriotism you dont mean the love of one`s homeland, for that I do know.
No, I dont mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year. Weve followed our road too far. And you, who hardly know what Im talking about, who show us the new road  He broke off. After a while he went on, in control again, cool and polite: Its because of fear that I refuse to urge your cause with the king, now. But not fear for myself, Mr. Ai. Im not acting patriotically. There are, after all, other nations on Gethen.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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 persons solitude which alone transcends it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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At the pit's bottom is no anger.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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You are rich. You own. We are poor. We lack. You have. We do not have. Everything is beautiful here, only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces. The men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels. There you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit, because our men and women are free possessing nothing. They are free. And you, the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail, each alone, solitary with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes, the wall, the wall.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Yes, that he will. There's the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters
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The tongue they speak there is not like any spoken in the Archipelago or the other Reaches, and they are a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired, and fierce, liking the sight of blood and the smell of burning towns.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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he thought no more of performing the lesser arts of magic than a bird thinks of flying. Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with printed matter seems misplaced.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wild Girls
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La libertad es una carga pesada, extraa y abrumadora para el espritu que ha de llevarla. No es cmoda. No es un regalo que se recibe, sino una eleccin que se hace, y la eleccin puede ser difcil.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Las Tumbas de Atuan
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The question was where to start. Where to build up a solid foundation of knowledge on which you could balance ideas. It wasnt 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else
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Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes....
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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So he worked.

He lost weight; he walked light on the earth. Lack of physical labor, lack of variety of occupation, lack of social and sexual intercourse, none of these appeared to him as lacks, but as freedom. He was the free man: he could do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it for as long as he wanted to do it. And he did. He worked. He work/played.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Ive never liked the word blogI suppose it is meant to stand for bio-log or something like that, but it sounds like a sodden tree trunk in a bog, or maybe an obstruction in the nasal passage (Oh, she talks that way because she has such terrible blogs in her nose).
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light. They could not hide you.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a fury in a cage. He had no right to tease them. They knew no relation but possession. They were possessed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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o. It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people arent beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You cant always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isnt enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are freepossessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyesthe wall, the wall!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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I respect commas far more than I respect congressmen.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Offering

I made a poem going
to sleep last night, woke
in sunlight, it was clean forgotten.

If it was any good, gods
of the great darkness
where sleep goes and farther
death goes, you not named,
then as true offering
accept it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems
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Omelas already exists: no need to build it or choose it. We already live here in the narrow, foul, dark prison we let our ignorance, fear, and hatred build for us and keep us in, here in the splendid, beautiful city of life. . . . --UKL, 2016
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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A bully doesnt answer you; he may hear but pays no heed; he talks on as if you were of no account, and it gives him the advantage always at the start, though not always
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
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Now, what is forbidden to the summoner, or any wizard, is to call a living spirit. We can call to them, yes. We can send to them a voice or a presentment, a seeming, of ourself. But we do not summon them, in spirit or in flesh, to come to us. Only the dead may we summon. Only the shadows. You can see why this must be. To summon a living man is to have entire power over him, body and mind. No one, no matter how strong or wise or great, can rightly own and use another.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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- Si continas as, si sigues huyendo, dondequiera que huyas siempre encontrars el peligro y el mal, porque es ella la que te lleva, la que elige tu camino. Eres t quien ha de elegir. Tienes que hostigar a quien te hostiga. Tienes que perseguir al cazador. - Ogin
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Un mago de Terramar I
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But I, who am old, who have done what I must do, who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know that there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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We're not outside the world... We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is their in our world?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
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And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
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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 offa sign, Shevek thought, either of great faith in human nature, or of great quantities of hot water.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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In the latter months of his own long sickness the Master Herbal had taught him much of the healer's lore, and the first lesson and the last of all that lore was this: Heal the wound and cure the illness, but let the dying spirit go.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Light is the left hand of darkness.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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 iteverything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is a collaboration, an act of participation. No wonder not everybody is up to it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wild Girls
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else
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I think we shall have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round and round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Gerek yolculuk geri dntr.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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And mage and sailor are not so far apart; both work with the powers of sky and sea, and bend great winds to the uses of their hands, bringing near what was remote.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Were a rough people, born of oak, as they say, here in the western land; tempers run high, weapons are always at hand.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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 'A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.'
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
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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 dont understand. And incomprehension is boredom.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 20002016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
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Eletirmenler Tolkien' 'basitletirmeciliinden', Orta Dnya'nn sakinlerini iyiler ve ktler diye ikiye ayrmasndan tr ok suladlar. Tolkien gerekten de bunu yapyor. [...] ykye ruhsal bir yolculuk olarak baktnzda ise ok farkl ve tuhaf bir eyle karlayorsunuz. O zaman karnza kan, her birinin kara bir glgesi olan parlak figrler topluluu. Elf'lere kar Ork'lar. Aragorn'a kar Kara Svari. Gandalf'a kar Saruman. Ve hepsinden te, Frodo'ya kar Gollum. Ona kar ve onunla birlikte.
[...]
Bu adan baktnzda Yzklerin Efendisi'ne basit bir yk diyebilir miyiz? Bence diyebiliriz. Kral Oedipus da olduka basit bir ykdr. Ancak basitletirici deildir. Ancak dnp glgesiyle yzlemi, karanla bakm birinin anlatabilecei bir ykdr.
Yzklerin Efendisi'nin fantazi dilinde yazlm olmas tesadf deildir; bunun nedeni Tolkien'n bir gereklik kaa olmas deildir, ocuklar iin yazmas da deildir. Neden, fantazinin ruhsal yolculuun 'ruhta' iyiyle ktnn mcadelesinin doal, en uygun dili olmasdr.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Kadnlar, Ryalar, Ejderhalar
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Im 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane  bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who arent there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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It is a great deal to ask of a kitten, to defend a man against the armies of the dead.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters
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The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel  or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel  is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become A person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. For the story  from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace  is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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Bucket

I feel so dreamy
dreamy lazy, crazy sleepy
like I want to be there
in the doorway, the doorway
or the porch corner
be sitting, be empty
notdoing not going
an old bucket left there
in the porch corner is like I am
an old empty bucket somebody left there.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
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And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry. Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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But if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of the job to be done and one's ability to do it, then you might say the chief virtue of excellent artists is their modesty...But knowing your limits and going to them isn't arrogance. It's greatness of spirit.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wild Girls
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When asked to "define the difference between fantasy and science fiction," I mouth and mumble and always end up talking about the spectrum, that very useful spectrum, along which one thing shades into another. Definitions are for grammar, not literature, I say, and boxes are for bones. But of course fantasy and science fiction are different, just as red and blue are different; they have different frequencies; if you mix them (on paperI work on paper) you get purple, something else again.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Predicition is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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SEEN ACROSS TEN MILES OF sunlit water, Lorbanery was green, green as the bright moss by a fountains 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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She was the woman in the table.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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No existe princpio nem fim, pois todas as coisas esto no Centro do Tempo. Assim como todas as estrelas podem se refletir numa gota de chuva caindo na noite, tambm todas as estrelas refletem a gota de chuva. No existe escurido nem morte, pois todas as coisas existem na luz do Instante, e seu fim e seu incio so um. Um centro, uma viso, uma lei, uma luz. Olhe agora no Olho de Meshe!
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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 traveler may never reach the end of it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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And she told me the same thing, she said that when I came back in the winter, she was going to miss missing me....
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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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!
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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What can I recommend? Trust your story; trust yourself; trust your readersbut wisely. Trust watchfully, not blindly. Trust flexibly, not rigidly. The whole thing, writing a story, is a high-wire actthere you are out in midair walking on a spiderweb line of words, and down in the darkness people are watching. What can you trust but your sense of balance?
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
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Greed puts out the sun.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
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Gerek kardelik paylalan acda balyor.

 Mlkszler
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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As he came to the bank Ogion, waiting, reached out his hand and clasping the boys arm whispered to him his true name: Ged.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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To go under a river: theres a strange thing to do, a really weird idea.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Life in the auntring, or for a settled man, is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Solitude
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You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth?
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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[Genre is] like working in any formin poetry, for example. 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 whos worked in form will agree with meis that the form leads you to what you want to say. It is wonderful and mysterious.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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. . . the literature of imaginatiion, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore offers hope.
 Ursula Le Guin
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Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences arent. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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Interruptions were sometimes more frequent than statements. The process, compared to a well-managed executive conference, was a slab of raw beef compared to a wiring diagram. Raw beef, however, functions better than a wiring diagram would, in its place  inside a living animal.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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.
  -- Ursula K Le Guin
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In diversity is life and where there's life there's hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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Orrs gods were nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship nor obedience.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this--letting 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 inescapable--but 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Late in the Day: Poems 20102014
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Under his feet he felt the hillroots going down and down into the dark, and over his head he saw the dry, far fires of the stars. Between, all things were his to order, to command. He stood at the center of the world.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Ethical counsel from the Under White Mountain people, far down the eastern coast of the Inland Sea, was not very well received. They advised: Do not fight these sick people, cure them with human behavior, to which Rekwit responded tersely, You come up north here and do that.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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The moment was gone; he saw it going. He did not try to hold on to it. He knew he was part of it, not it of him. He was in its keeping.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. But I will not believe that. I want the walls down. I want solidarity, human solidarity.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Positive thinking founded on denial may not be so great.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do - they never adapt either.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Desar's chosen field in mathematics was so esoteric that nobody in the Institute or the Math Federation could really check on his progress. That was precisely why he had chosen it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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[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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Day Before the Revolution
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Having replaced instinct with language, society, and culture, we are the only species that depends on teaching and learning. We arent human without them. In them is true power. But are they the occupations of the rich and mighty?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
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Crafty writers...don't allow Exposition to form Lumps. They break up the information, grind it fine, and make it into bricks to build the story with.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew
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I don't know. We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters
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I spoke your true name. It's not what I thought it would be. And I don't feel easy about it. As if I'd left something unfinished. But it is your name. If it betrays you, then that's the truth of it."
Rose hesitated and then spoke less angrily, more coldly: "If you want the power to betray me, Irian, I'll give you that. My name is Etaudis."

"Dragonfly
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then. 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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The moths look like souls in the underworld,
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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These two issues combinedour inability to deal with our own numbers and our insistence that we are what matters mostmay well be the finish of us.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Do the people in this country approve of this war?" [...].
"Approve? You don't think we'd lie down and let the damned Thuvians walk all over us? Our status as a world power is at stake!"
"But I mean the people, not the government. The... the people who must fight."
"What's it to them? They're used to mass conscriptions. It's what they're for, my dear fellow! To fight for their country. And let me tell you, there's no better soldier on earth than the Ioti man of the ranks, once he's broken in to taking orders. In peacetime he may spout sentimental pacifism, but the grit's there, underneath. The common soldier hs always been our greatest resource as a nation. It's how we became the leader we are."
"By climbing up on a pile of dead children?" [...].
"No,"[...] "you'll find the soul of the people true as steel, when the country's threatened. A few rabble-rousers in Nio and the mill towns make a big noise between wars, but it's grand to see how people close ranks when the flag's in danger. You're unwilling to believe that, I know. The trouble with Odonianism, [...], is that it's womanish. It simply doesn't include the virile side of life. 'Blood and steel, battle's brightness,' as the old poet says. It doesn't understand courage--love of the flag."
[...] "That may be true, in part. At least, we have no flags.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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If there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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But in fact, isn't that man's very purpose on earth--to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?"
"No!"
"What is his purpose, then?"
"I don't know. Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, and 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, From Elfland to Poughkeepsie
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Are all the scientists here men, then? Scientists? Oiie asked, incredulous. Pae coughed. Scientists. Oh, yes, certainly, theyre all men. There are some female teachers in the girls schools, of course. But they never get past Certificate level. Why not? Cant do the math; no head for abstract thought; dont belong. You know how it is, what women call thinking is done with the uterus! Of course, theres 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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No normal human being who had experienced time-slippage of even a few decades between League worlds would volunteer for a round trip of centuries. The Surveyors were escapists, misfits. They were nuts. Ten
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin
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THINKING about Homer, and it occurred to me that his two books are the two basic fantasy stories: the War and the Journey.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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And he began to see the truth, that [he] had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Capitalisms grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecologys imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status ["On the Future of the Left," Motherboard, February 4, 2015].
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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 , ,    ,     ,   ,     ,    ,    .     ,            .   ,     ,        .        .     ,    ,     ,     ,    ,     .         .         ,                   .  ,              ,                    .       .   ,      .   ,     .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Bir kabusta yayorum, diye geirdi iinden, arada bir uykumda aylabildiim bir kabusta.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven / The Dispossessed / The Wind's Twelve Quarters
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But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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I think most old people know that, and many of us try to keep our thinking on the positive side as a matter of self-preservation, as well as dignity, the wish not to end with a prolonged whimper.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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People are supposed to be lean. You cant be too thin, everybody says so, especially anorexics. People are supposed to be lean and taut, because thats how men generally are, lean and taut, or anyhow thats 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 Im really lousy at being people, because Im not lean at all but sort of podgy, with actual fat places. I am untaut.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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No, thats true  You hate Orgoreyn, dont you? Very few Orgota know how to cook. Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? 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 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 ones country; is it hate of ones uncountry? Then its not a good thing. It is simply self-love? Thats a good thing, but one mustnt 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Of course, the books you read early, before 20, and love passionately, they get to you. Even if later on you cant read them again. You were shaped by certain books. All of us that read a lot, were partly book-manufactured. Its really hard to talk about the influence of such books on you because it goes so deep. Its like, what was your fathers influence on you, what was your mothers 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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Love doesnt just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Estraven asleep looked a little stupid, like everyone asleep.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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     .       ,   .   , ?        .      .   ,       ,               .            .               .       .    .
  , - ,  ,     :
     ,   -   ,    , ,   ,    .     ,   ,   ,   .        ?      ,    ,       .     ,     ,  ,     -,  ,   .           .        -  ,             ?            .       ,   ,      -          . ,  ,                 .                        ,    .     .     ,      ?       ,    .    ,   ,     , ,       .           ,        .              .  , .       ,    .

 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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La luz es la mano izquierda de la oscuridad, y la oscuridad es la mano derecha de la luz; las dos son una, vida y muerte, juntas como amantes
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone. Hidden
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin
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Minne oppaani ystvllisyydessn minut johdattavat, / Min seuraan, seuraan kevyesti / eik tomuun taaksemme / j ainuttakaan jalanjlke.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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Orr slept. He dreamed. There was no rub.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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He began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Ea, which is the oldest song, it is said, 'Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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. Eliots poems a bird sings, Mankind cannot bear very much reality. Ive 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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Was he leaving home, or going home?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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We cried Sisterhood is powerful!and they believed us. Terrified misogynists of both sexes were howling that the house was burning down before most feminists found out where the matches were.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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It is our suffering that brings us together.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fictionwriters of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

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, visionariesthe realists of a larger reality.

Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the 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 quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.)

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.)

Books, you know, theyre not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. 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, and very often in our artthe art of words.

I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really dont want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing wantand should demandour fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

Thank you.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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While we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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and none could cry Murder, but only Justice done.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I have learned how I work best, and that is something that, if you're going to be a professional writer, you should be noticing: under what circumstances you work at your best, and to not get yourself cornered into writing in a way that doesn't let you do your best.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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  ,      ,         ,    ,    ,  ,             ,
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelists 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 dont recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. Its none of their business. All theyre trying to do is tell you what theyre like, and what you're like -- whats 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 dont 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]
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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she had never known who she was at all, except sometimes for a moment in meditation, when her I am became It is, and she breathed the stars
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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A voice in the darkness said, You have come too far. Arren answered it, saying, Only too far is far enough.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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How would it ever occur to a sane man that he could fly?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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 of it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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As a man's knowledge grows, and his power increases, the road he takes grows ever narrower, until at last he does only and wholly what he must.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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The admirable is inexplicable.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can't life and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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On the dock Yarrow stood and watched them go, as sailors wives and sisters stand on all the shores of all Earthsea watching their men go out on the sea, and they do not wave or call aloud, but stand still in hooded cloak of grey or brown, there on the shore that dwindles smaller and smaller from the boat while the water grows wide between.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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I learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence. By
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin
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The quality and virtue of a slave is invisibility. The powerless need to be invisible even to themselves.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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...you play the instrument you have.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Compass Rose
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Women used and did what there was to use and do, but men shunned and despised a great many things, such as wicker chairs and cooking and storytelling, depriving themselves of many skills and pleasures, in order to prove that they weren't women. Wouldn't it be better to prove it by doing, rather than by not doing?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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Wasnt it immoral to do work you didnt enjoy? The work needed doing but a lot of people didnt care what they were posted to and changed jobs all the time; they should have volunteered. Any fool could do this work.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you cant use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and cant dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
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The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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The poet Gary Snyders 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 childs room, a fin in a waste of waters. All this stuff goes down into the novelists 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 isnt an artichoke stem and a potato eye and a gesture. Its a new thing, a new whole. Its made up.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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What is his purpose, then? I dont know. Things dont have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. Whats the function of a galaxy? I dont know if our life has a purpose and I dont see that it matters. What does matter is that were a part.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
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his story told of the kings 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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I named you once, I think," he said, and then strode to his house and entered, bearing the bird still on his wrist.
 Ursula LeGuin
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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 mens 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Se puteau da jos foi dup foi de pe o ceap i totui s nu apar nimic altceva dect tot ceap.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap-works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn't work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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It takes a while to spoil a world, but it can be done.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness
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They were not victors, he and his kind, not in any way, they were the defeated still, for they had become like their betters.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I could forget everything I'd lost, because I'd never had it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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Incommunicable. Language used for communication with individual-persons will not contain other forms of relationship. Jor Jor. The right hand, a great, greenish, flipperlike extremity, came forward in a slow and perhaps tentative fashion. Tiuak Ennbe Ennbe. Orr shook hands with it. It stood immobile, apparently regarding him, though no eyes were visible inside the dark-tinted, vapor-filled headpiece. If it was a headpiece. Was there in fact any substantial form within that green carapace, that mighty armor? He didnt know. He felt, however, completely at ease with Tiuak Ennbe Ennbe. I dont suppose, he said, on impulse again, that you ever knew anyone named Lelache? Lelache. No. Do you seek Lelache. I have lost Lelache. Crossings in mist, the
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Es algo terrible, esta bondad que los seres humanos nunca pierden. Terrible, porque cuando nos encontrbamos desnudos en la oscuridad, y helados, no tenamos otra cosa. Nosotros que somos tan capaces, tan fuertes, terminamos en eso. No nos queda otra cosa.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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A warm body sighed in the darkness inside the little bright object balanced elegantly in the orbit of the moon.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Fisherman of the Inland Sea
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Actually, I dont exactly have expectations. I have hopes, and fears.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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For the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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But Vetch, who had not done so lightly, said, Her name is safe with you as mine is. And, besides, you knew it without my telling you . . .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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How It Seems To Me

In the vast abyss before time, self
is not, and soul commingles
with mist, and rock, and light. In time,
soul brings the misty self to be.
Then slow time hardens self to stone
while ever lightening the soul,
till soul can loose its hold of self
and both are free and can return
to vastness and dissolve in light,
the long light after time.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, So Far So Good Final Poems: 2014-2018
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Back then, in 1967, wizards were all, more or less, Merlin and Gandalf. Old men, peaked hats, white beards. But this was to be a book for young people. Well, Merlin and Gandalf must have been young once, right? And when they were young, when they were fool kids, how did they learn to be wizards? And there was my book.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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But the human being likes to be challenged, seeks freedom in adversity.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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The old farfetchers' motto: Opinion ends reception.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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But by God sometimes you have to be able to think about the unthinkable!
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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In other ways my story didnt follow the tradition. Its subversive elements attracted little attention, no doubt because I was deliberately sneaky about them. A great many white readers in 1967 were not ready to accept a brown-skinned hero. But they werent expecting one. I didnt make an issue of it, and you have to be well into the book before you realize that Ged, like most of the characters, isnt white.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Wold felt sorry for him, as he often did for young men, who have not seen how passion and plan over and over are wasted, how their lives and acts are wasted between desire and fear.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Planet of Exile
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The dead are dead. The great and mighty go their way unchecked. The only hope in the world lies in the people of no account.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Alas, I had no power, at that time, to combat the flat refusal of many cover departments to put people of color on a book jacket. So, through many later, lily-white Geds, Ruth Robbinss painting for the first editionthe fine, strong profile of a young man with copper-brown skinwas, to me, the books one true cover.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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 anothers scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one anothers blood or flesh, keep one another warm, that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands
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I will tell my tale as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that truth is a matter of the imagination.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The law of evolution is that the strongest survives! Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical. You see, we have neither prey nor enemy, on Anarres. We have only one another. There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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There were actually very few men who could face reality when the going got tough.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human. We
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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Id like a poster showing two old people with stooped backs and arthritic hands and time-worn faces sitting talking, deep, deep in conversation. And the slogan would be Old Age Is Not for the Young.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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I stood benumbed. The man was like an electric shock--nothing to hold on to and you don't know what hit you.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Heathen" is merely a word for somebody who knows a different sacredness than you know
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices
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you're not a traitor, youve merely been the tool of one. I dont punish tools. They do harm only in the hands of a bad workman.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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We who are called royal are those who speak for our people to the powers of the earth and sky, as those powers transmit their will through us to the people. We are go-betweens. The chief duty of a king is to perform the rites of praise and placation as they should be performed, to observe care and ceremony and so understand and make known the will of the powers that are greater than we are. It is the king who tells the farmer when to plow, when to plant, when to harvest, when the cattle should go up to the hills and when they should return to the valleys, as he learns these things from his experience and his service at the altars of earth and sky. In the same way it is the mother of the family who tells her household when to rise, what work to do, what food to prepare and cook, and when to sit to eat it, having learned these things from her experience and her service at the altars of her Lares and Penates. So peace is maintained and things go well, in the kingdom and in the house. Both Aeneas and I had grown up in this responsibility, and it was dear to us both.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means. Orr
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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One keeps oneself neat out of mere decency mere sanity, awareness of other people. And finally even that goes, and one dribbles unashamed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Day Before the Revolution
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 'The fact is,' I said, 'that you're unable, or unwilling, to believe in the fact that I believe in you.'
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Despite what some adults seem to think, teenagers are fully human.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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There is no more subversive act than the act of writing from a woman's experience of life using a woman's judgment.
"Prospects for Women in Writing" 1986
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
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Time says Let there be
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.

And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats flickering dance.
And the seas expanse.
And death, and chance.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Honorifics and meaningless ritual phrases of greeting, leave-taking, permission-asking, and false gratitude, please, thank you, you're welcome, goodbye, fossil relics of primitive hypocrisyall were stumbling blocks to truthfulness between producer-consumers.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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A key is a little thing next to the door that it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin
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A hero whose heroism consists of killing people is uninteresting to me, and I detest the hormonal war orgies of our visual media, the mechanical slaughter of endless battalions of black-clad, yellow-toothed, red-eyed demons. 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. Or does might make right?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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All the mystery and wisdom of the masters, when it's out in the daylight, doesn't amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade. Wonderful illusions. But people don't want to know that. They want the illusions, the mysteries. Who can blame them? There's so little in life that's beautiful and worthy.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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Paradise is for those who make Paradise.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friends voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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If you play against your own side youll lose the whole game.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Ged iss la vela. Tutto aveva l'aria di essere stato usato a lungo, faticosamente, sebbene la vela rossocupa fosse rattoppata con grande cura e la barca fosse pulita e ben tenuta. erano come il loro padrone: erano andate lontano, e la vita non le aveva trattate con dolcezza.
 Ora  disse Ged,  ora siamo partiti, ora siamo liberi, siamo andati, Tenar. Lo senti anche tu?
Lei lo sentiva. Una mano tenebrosa aveva allentato la stretta che aveva serrato il suo cuore per tutta la vita. Ma non provava pi gioia, come l'aveva provata invece tra le montagne. Abbass la testa tra le braccia e pianse, e le sue guance erano umide e salmastre. Piangeva per lo spreco dei suoi anni, asserviti a un male inutile. Piangeva di dolore, perch era libera.
Aveva incominciato ad apprendere il peso della libert. La libert  un fardello oneroso, un grande e strano fardello per lo spirito che se l'addossa. Non  agevole. Non  un dono ma una scelta, e la scelta pu essere dura. La strada sale, verso la luce: ma il viandante oberato pu anche non raggiungerla mai.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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Pregnant women have no ethics.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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She waved through the dirty window from her seat as the train started up. I did not do the ape act. I stood there and did the human act as well as possible.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Fact is one of our finest fictions.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
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The unknown, said Faxes soft voice in the forest, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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 wordslove, honor, freedomare 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices
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To the Bullock Roseroot

What's the thought you think
all your life long?
It must be a great one,
a solemn one, to make you gaze
through the world at it,
all your life long.
When you have to look aside from it
your eyes roll, you bellow
in anger, anxious
to return to it, steadily
to gaze at it, think it
all your life long.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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In diversity is life and where there's life there's hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest! one to be sure.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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He looked at me. His firm, broad face showed weight-loss in deep shadows under the cheekbones, his eyes were sunken and his mouth sorely chapped and cracked. God knows what I looked like, when he looked like that. He smiled. 'With luck we shall make it, and without luck we shall not.'
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I hate complaining to strangersyou can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes: Stories
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 '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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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In this he saw that Ogion had been right: the shadow could not draw on his power, so long as he was turned against it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Pride kept her from confiding in the other girls, and caution kept her from confessing to the older women.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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Why hadnt 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 didnt have it. She had a sneaky, sly, shy, squamous personality. She had French diseases of the soul.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Only what is mortal bears life, Arren. Only in death is there rebirth. The Balance is not a stillness. it is a movement--an eternal becoming.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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In absence, presence. In death, life.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Facts are no more slid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. Bot both are sensitive.
 Le Guin Ursula
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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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth
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Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting ... Instead of seeing birth as an awakening from blank nonbeing and fetal incompletion into the child's fullness of being, and seeing maturity as a narrowing, impoverishing journey toward blank death, [Wordsworth's] ode proposes that a soul enters life forgetting its eternal being, can remember it throughout life only in intimations and moments of revelation, and will recall and rejoin it fully only in death.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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To find a new world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.
  -- Ursula K Le Guin
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To deny the past is to deny the future. A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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. I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made two hundred years ago in this citythe promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Of course it happened. An effective dream is a reality, Dr. Haber.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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...
 Le Guin Ursula
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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So many of his problems were of a kind that other people did not understand, that he got used to working them out for himself, in silence.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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 doesnt wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because shes 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 doesnt wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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zgrlk ar bir yktr, ruhun yklenmesi gereken byk ve garip bir sorumluluk. Kolay deildir. Verilen bir armaan deil, yaplan bir seimdir; bu seim de zor bir seim olabilir.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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He lost weight; he walked light on the earth. Lack of physical labour, lack of variety of occupation, lack of social and sexual intercourse, none of these appeared to him as lacks, but as freedom.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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the truth is a matter of the imagination
 LeGuin, Ursula
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The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrdinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future indeed Schrdinger's most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the 'future,' on the quantum level, cannot be predicted but to describe reality, the present world.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Dnya hep yenidir, kkleri ne kadar eski de olsa.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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Where will you sleep? he inquired, sitting down heavily on the bed. No where, the Alien replied, its toneless voice dividing the word into two equally significant wholes.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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This Stone

He went looking for a road
that doesn't lead to death.
He went looking for that road
and found it.
It was a stone road.
He walked that road
that doesn't lead to death.
He walked on it awhile
before he stopped,
having turned to stone.
Now he stands there on that road
that doesn't lead to death
not going anywhere.
He can't dance.
from his eyes stones fall.
The rainbow people pass him
crossing that road, long-legged, light-stepping,
going from the Four Houses
to the dancing in the Five Houses.
They pick up his tears.
This stone is a tear
from his eye, this stone
given me on the mountain
by one who died before my birth,
this stone, this stone.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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She touched his face and tied his hair back for him. Her hands were cool. He had never felt anything pleasanter in all his life than the touch of her hands. He reached out for her hand. She was not there, she had gone.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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There are souls, he thought, who's umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as the enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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No era l quien haca las cosas: las cosas lo hacan a l. Haba estado en manos de otra gente. La voluntad no haba actuado. No haba tenido necesidad de actuar. La voluntad haba estado en el comienzo, ella haba creado este momento y las paredes que ahora lo rodeaban.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom...and that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, when they need it, and that's always.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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Ebediyet beni ilgilendirmez. Ben bir meeyim, ne bir eksik ne bir fazla. Bir grevim var ve yerine getiriyorum; holandm eyler var ve onlardan keyif alyorum. Geri sayca azaldlar. nk kular da azald. Hem, rzgr da berbat kokuyor artk. Tamam, uzun mrlym ama benim de geici bir ey olmaya hakkm var. lml olma ayrcalm var. Oysa bu ayrcalk elimden alnd.
...
Dnya da lm gzleriyle grmek isteyen varsa bu onlarn sorunu, benim deil. Onlar iin Ebediyet'i oynayamam. lm isteyen, aalara bavurmasn. Grmek istedikleri o ise, birbirlerinin gzlerine baksnlar ve lm orada grsnler.

 Rzgarn On ki Yakas - Yolun Yn
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters
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He gave way to the fear that had come with her, the sense of the breaking of promises, the incoherence of Time. He broke.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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My mother died at eighty-three, of cancer, in pain, her spleen enlarged so that her body was misshapen. Is that the person I see when I think of her? Sometimes. I wish it were not. It is a true image, yet it blurs, it clouds, a truer image. It is one memory among fifty years of memories of my mother. It is the last in time. Beneath it, behind it is a deeper, complex, ever-changing image, made from imagination, hearsay, photographs, memories. I see a little red-haired child in the mountains of Colorado, a sad-faced, delicate college girl, a kind, smiling young mother, a brilliantly intellectual woman, a peerless flirt, a serious artist, a splendid cookI see her rocking, weeding, writing, laughing  I see the turquoise bracelets on her delicate, freckled arm  I see, for a moment, all that at once, I glimpse what no mirror can reflect, the spirit flashing out across the years, beautiful.

That must be what the great artists see and paint. That must be why the tired, aged faces in Rembrandts portraits give us such delight: they show us beauty not skin-deep but life-deep.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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Be still! the Head Isle-Man said roughly, for he knew, as did most of them, that a wizard may have subtle ways of telling the truth, and may keep the truth to himself, but that if he says a thing the thing is as he says.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I think of when I was in high school in the 1940s: the white girls got their hair crinkled up by chemicals and heat so it would curl, and the black girls got their hair mashed flat by chemicals and heat so it wouldnt curl. Home perms hadnt been invented yet, and a lot of kids couldnt afford these expensive treatments, so they were wretched because they couldnt follow the rules, the rules of beauty.

Beauty always has rules. Its a game. I resent the beauty game when I see it controlled by people who grab fortunes from it and dont care who they hurt. I hate it when I see it making people so self-dissatisfied that they starve and deform and poison themselves.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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No sirve de nada tener una respuesta cuando la pregunta est equivocada.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Los mundos de Ursula K. Le Guin
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 I guess I tend to think that important events should be solemn, and very grand, with muted violins playing in the background. Its hard to realize that the really important things are just normal little happenings and decisions, and when they turn on the background music and the spotlights and the uniforms, nothing important is going to happen at all., "Very Far Away from Anywhere Else
 Ursula K.Le Guin
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But I guess I can't, or my subconscious can't, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you're trying to use, not my rational mind. Maybe rationally I could conceive of the human species not trying to kill each other off by nations, in fact rationally it's easier to conceive than the motives of war. But you're handling something outside reason. You're trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn't suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Slo una pregunta tiene respuesta, Genry, y ya conocemos la respuesta... La vida es posible slo a causa de esa permanente e intolerable incertidumbre: no conocer lo que vendr
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Los mundos de Ursula K. Le Guin
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Never fear. It is much easier for men to act than to refrain from acting. We will continue to do good and to do evil. But if there were a king over us all again and he sought the counsel of a mage, as in the days of old, and I were that mage, I would say to him: My lord, do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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I wrote an essay about the rhythm of Tolkiens writing in The Lord of the Rings. Short rhythms repeated form long rhythms; theres a cyclical repetition in his work which I think is part of why it totally enchants so many of us. We are caught in this rhythm and are happy there.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing
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Ill make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I felt the pressure of people all around me, all the time. People around me, people with me, people pressing on me, pressing me to be one of them, one of the people.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands
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...Vermediimiz eyi alamazsnz, kendinizi vermeniz gerekir. Devrim'i satn alamazsnz. Devrim'i yapamazsnz. Devrim olabilirsiniz ancak. Devrim ya ruhunuzdadr ya da hi bir yerde deildir.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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And I did nothing, nothing but try to hide from the horror of dying." He stopped, for saying the truth aloud was unendurable. It was not shame that stopped him, but fear, the same fear. He knew now why this tranquil life in sea and sunlight on the rafts seemed to him like an after-life or a dream, unreal. It was because he knew in his heart that reality was empty: without life or warmth or color or sound: without meaning. There were no heights or depths. All this lovely play of form and light and color on the sea and in the eyes of men, was no more than that, a playing of illusions on the shallow void.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Where, then, is Truth? declaimed Bedap, and yawned. In the hill one happens to be sitting on, said Tirin.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Books, you know, theyre not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. 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, and very often in our artthe art of words.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Hope is a slighter, tougher thing even than trust, he thought, pacing his room as the soundless, vague lightning flashed overhead. 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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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 ships systems, like a mechanical sea.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth
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Lord Berosty rem ir Ipe came to Thangering Fastness and offered forty beryls and half the years yield from his orchards as the price of a Foretelling, and the price was acceptable. He set his question to the Weaver Odren, and the question was, On what day shall I die?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not. In the Sight of Meshe there is no darkness. Therefore those that call upon the darkness are made fools of and spat out from the mouth of Meshe, for they name what is not, calling it Source and End. There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Centre 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. One centre, one seeing, one law, one light. Look now into the Eye of Meshe!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be irritating, but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Solitude
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The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth an light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale's sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat's flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole. But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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She had a pocket recorder and was taking all this down: every five seconds, as the law required, the thing went teep. Will you describe the therapy you're employing please, teep and explain the role this device plays in it? Dont tell me how it teep works, thats in your report, but what it does. Teep for instance, how does its use differ from the Elektroson or the trancap?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Todos tenemos que aprender a inventarnos una vida, crearla, imaginarla. Necesitamos que nos enseen esas capacidades; necesitamos guas que nos muestren cmo hacerlo. Si no lo hacemos nuestras vidas acaban siendo controladas por los dems.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Homer truly doesnt take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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If you can see a thing whole, he said, it seems that its always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up, a worlds all dirt and rocks. And day to day, lifes 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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The child stared at her or at nothing, trying to breathe, and trying again to breathe, and trying again to breathe.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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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 dont recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. Its none of their business.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Its nothing to do with eternity, said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. Ill die, youll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The suns going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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While Im reading a story I want to be able to suspend disbelief; the more questions of authorial reliability force themselves on me, the weaker the hold of the narrative. This is a nave approach to fiction, granted, but a tough one, since intellect, cleverness, charm, wit, tact, even fact cannot conceal incredibility.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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Little children are stoical. They cry over bumps, but they take the big things as they come, they don't whine like so many adults.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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By the end of this second day of wasted effort, scrabbling and squirming over pressure-blocks and up ice-cliffs always to be stopped by a sheer face or overhang, trying farther on and failing again, Ai was exhausted and enraged. He looked ready to cry, but did not. I believe he considers crying either evil or shameful. Even when he was very ill and weak, the first days of our escape, he hid his face from me when he wept. Reasons personal, racial, social, sexual  how can I guess why Ai must not weep? Yet his name is a cry of pain.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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... anlatlacak hikaye ne kadar oksa hakikat de o kadar oktu.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
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Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after semicolons, and another one after now. And
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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sentences arent. 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 havent done one single thing about it, with a gun or anything. What
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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You seemed, in your power, as free as man can be. But at what cost? What made you free? And I... I was made, moulded like clay, by the will of the women serving the Old Powers, or serving the men who made all services and ways and places, I no longer know which. Then I went free, with you, for a moment, and with Ogion. But it was not my freedom. Only it gave me a choice; and I chose. I chose to mould myself like clay to the use of a farm and a farmer and our children. I made myself a vessel. I know its shape. But not the clay. Life danced me. I know the dances. But I don't know who the dancer is.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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But the death of a great mage, who has many times in his life walked on the dry steep hillsides of deaths kingdom, is a strange matter: for the dying man goes not blindly, but surely, knowing the way.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are freepossessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyesthe wall, the wall!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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What is the sense of giving a boundary to all... of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I forgot, being too interested myself, that hes a king, and does not see things rationally, but as a king. All Ive told him means to him simply that his power is threatened, his kingdom is a dust mote in space, his kingship is a joke to men who rule a hundred worlds.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Lanet olsun! dedi yksek sesle. Pravca, kfr etmek iin iyi bir dil deildi. Cinsellik pis bir ey olmaynca, gnaha girme diye bir ey de olmaynca kfretmek zordur.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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I didn't know you well at all. Only, when you spoke, I seemed to see clear into you, into the center.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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All her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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Consistency is a virtue until it gets annoying.
 ursula le guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume One: Where on Earth: 1
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... it was joy they were both after - the completeness of being. If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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The sun itself was hidden, but there was a glitter on the horizon, almost like the dazzle of the crystal walls of the Undertomb, a kind of joyous shimmering off on the edge of the world.

"What is that?' the girl said, and he: "The sea.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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It's a queer business, making oneself blind.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
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The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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But I'm not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Take care, Tenar, he said.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choicethe power of change, the essential function of life.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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He recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his "cellular function." the analogic term for the individual's individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength. That was a central idea of Odo's Analogy. That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; just the contrary. With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and the individual became clear. Sacrifice mught 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
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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We came, Takver thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that's already between us, the distance of our sex, the differences of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, he comes back....
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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With eye and hand and breath and will.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
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No, I dont mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the rivers relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Farei meu relatrio como se contasse uma histria, pois quando criana aprendi, em meu planeta natal, que a Verdade  uma questo de imaginao. O fato mais concreto pode fraquejar ou triunfar no estilo da narrativa: como a jia orgnica singular de nossos mares, cujo brilho aumenta quando determinada mulher a usa e, usada por outra, torna-se opaca e perde o valor. Fatos no so mais slidos, coerentes, perfeitos e reais do que prolas. Mas ambos so sensveis.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Mo Esquerda da Escurido
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... privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
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A lot of snow out of one cloud, and it grows thicker.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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An early visitor described a Veksi village as five big houses full of women swearing at each other and fourteen little houses full of men sulking.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes: Stories
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Ljudi koji je ne itaju, pa ak i neki od onih koji je piu, vole da podrazumevaju ili da se pretvaraju kako zamisli upotrebljene u naunoj fantastici potiu sve iz podrobnog poznavanja nebeske mehanike i kvantne teorije, i da su, zato, razumljive samo onim itaocima koji rade za NASA i znaju da programiraju svoj video-rikorder da sam snimi neto kad oni nisu kod kue. Ovo uobraenje omoguuje piscima da se oseaju nadmono, ali 'neitaocima' prua izgovor. Ja ovo naprosto ne razumem, cvile oni, i nalaze utoite u dubokim, udobnim, anaerobnim peinama tehnofobije. Ne vredi njima govoriti da je i meu piscima naune fantastike vrlo mali broj onih koji razumeju 'to'. I mi, u najveem broju sluajeva, naemo na video-kaseti epizodu serije 'Volim Lusi' i polovinu nekog rvakog mea, kad smo hteli da nam rikodrer snimi 'Remek-dela pozorita'. Veina naunih zamisli u naunoj fantastici potpuno je dostupna i prihvatljiva svakome ko je uspeo da poloi esti razred osnovne kole; osim toga, niko vas nee ispitati kad zavrite knjigu. To 'neto', zvano nauna fantastika, ipak nije prerueni prirunik za inenjerstvo. Niti zbirka pronalazaka nekog matematikog Sotone - 'problem-pria'. Sastoji se od obinih, prosto-naprosto, pria. To je knjievnost, ona obrauje izvesne teme zato to u njima nalazi neto zanimljivo, neku lepotu, ili vezu sa ljudskim stanjem na ovom svetu. ak i u trapavom i netanom nazivu 'nauna fantastika', re 'nauna' je pridev, dakle ona je modifikator, to znai: u slubi je imenice 'fantastika'.........
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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                  ,      ,    .      -      ,      ,           ,     ,         .            ,            .   ,   ,  ,         ,      .   .   ,    ,     ,       .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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If piano is the opposite of forte, graceful chitchat with strangers is definitely my piano.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is he'll be much godlier after he's dead.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Oh Lavinia, Lavinia, you are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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Cured? Goss said. Would you cure a singer of his voice?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I asked if these two psychopaths could not be cured. Cured? Goss said. Would you cure a singer of his voice?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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El pesado ropn negro que llevaba desde haca aos haba desaparecido; tena ahora un vestido de seda color turquesa, brillante y delicado como el cielo del atardecer, acampanado en las caderas. Y la falda estaba toda bordada con finos hilos de plata, perlas y gemas de cristal, y reluca levemente como la lluvia de abril
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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 ,     , ,  .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Dnceler bask altna alnarak yok edilemez. Onlar ancak dikkate alnmayarak yok edilebilir. Dnmeyi reddederek - deimeyi reddederek.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Bana grlmeye deer bir ey gstermemi sylemitin. Ben de sana, seni gsterdim.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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When I was young I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are. How
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, theres no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little kids cant do it; babies are morally monsters  completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy. [It's the writer's] pleasant duty is to ply the readers imagination with the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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nusuth
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The story is the way the story is told.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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He knew that insofar as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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It goes right back to the idea of the Power of Positive Thinking, which is so strong in America because it fits in so well with the Power of Commercial Advertising and with the Power of Wishful Thinking, aka the American Dream.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Hector had no virtue? Of course he did. He won all his battles, till the last one. We all do, Aeneas remarked.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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 bom ter um objetivo nas jornadas que empreendemos; mas, no fim das contas, o que importa  a jornada em si.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Mo Esquerda da Escurido
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They are of the dream time. I don't understand it, I can't say it in words. Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes. . . .But when the mind becomes conscious, when the rate of evolution speeds up, then you have to be careful. Careful of the world. You must learn the way. You must learn the skills, the art, the limits. A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully--as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously. Do you see? Does it mean anything to you?
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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...la diferencia no est en copular; est en la otra persona. Y dieciocho aos es como si empezaras cuando descubres [i]esa[/i]diferencia. Al menos, si es una mujer lo que ests tratando de entender. A una mujer puede no durarle tanto el misterio de un hombre, aunque quiz representen una comedia... Como quiera que sea, se es el gusto de la cosa. Los misterios y las comedias y todo lo dems. La variedad. La variedad no se obtiene slo yendo de un lado a otro (...) No es ir de un lado a otro lo que te mantiene vivo. Es tener tu propio tiempo. Trabajar con el tiempo, no contra l.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Ultimately you write alone.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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 choicethe power of change, the essential function of life.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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She had made these with scrap wire and tools from the craft supply depot, and called them Occupations of Uninhabited Space.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Bir hrsz yaratmak iin bir sahip yaratn; su yaratmak istiyorsanz, yasalar koyun.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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I think one cannot be left alive among so many deaths without feeling unendurable shame.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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I came away from both these concerts marveling that while our republic tears itself apart and our species frantically hurries to destroy its own household, yet we go on building with vibrations in the air, in the spiritmaking this music, this intangible, beautiful, generous thing.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our artthe art of words.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Things dont have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. Whats the function of a galaxy? I dont know if our life has a purpose and I dont see that it matters. What does matter is that were 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful the life is, is from the vantage point of death.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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I cant decide which color I am. I mean, my father was a black, a real blackoh, he had some white blood, but he was a blackand my mother was a white, and Im neither one. See, my father really hated my mother because she was white. But he also loved her. But I think she loved his being black much more than she loved him. Well, where does that leave me? I never have figured out. Brown, he said gently, standing behind her chair. Shit color. The color of the earth.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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But we're all walking in the night, now, on ground we don't know. When the day comes we may know where we are, or we may not.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
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The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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if I wanted to be the center of the universe Id have a dog.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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The sleeper dreamed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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So God is dead, at least as a swearword, but hate and feces keep going strong. Le roi est mort, vive le fucking roi.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
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You wont be running marathons and lifting weights. You may have trouble getting up the stairs. You may have trouble just getting out of bed. You may have trouble getting used to hurting all the time. And it isnt likely to get better as the years go on.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Thus they both set a fatal trap for the believer: if you believe in God you cant believe in evolution, and vice versa. But this is rather like saying if you believe in Tuesday you cant believe in artichokes.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Cmo odia uno a un pas, o lo ama? Tibe habla de eso; yo no soy capaz. Conozco gente, conozco ciudades, granjas, montaas y ros y piedras, conozco cmo se pone el sol en otoo del lado de un cierto campo arado en las colinas; pero Qu sentido tiene encerrar todo en una frontera, darle un nombre y dejar de amarlo donde el nombre cambia? Qu es el amor al propio pas? el odio a lo que no es el propio pas? Nada bueno. Slo amor propio? Bien, pero no es posible hacer de eso una virtud, o una profesin...Mientras tenga amor a la vida, amar tambin las colinas del dominio de Estre, pero este amor no tiene fronteras de odio.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Bence bugn ou insan, dile getirmeseler bile, tevazuu bir erdem olarak gryor ve hayatnda tevazua yer veriyor. Gnlk sohbetleri, marangozlarn birlikte alrken, sekreterlerin molalarda konuurken, birlikte ien veya yemek yiyen insanlarn ilgi konular ve bildikleri zerine gndelik konumalarn dnyorum ve bu tr durumlarda tevazuun lt sayld fikrindeyim. Arabam nasl ucuza kapattm, uraya ne seyahat yaptm, mthi seks hayatm, Isa'yla zel ilikim, vesaire yollu gevezelikler, ho veya naho biimleriyle zellikle erkekleri dinleyen kadnlardan kar ve yaylr. Ama geni kapsamda mtevaz sohbet toparlanr, bir kayann etrafndan akan sular misali tekrar bir araya gelir ve kesintisiz akar. Sradan insanlar bir arada tutan eydir mtevaz sohbet. Reklamn zdddr. Birliktir. Paylamdr. Duygu ortakldr.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wild Girls
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?
In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of any meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course its right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We cant prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, well have known pain for fifty years. And in the end well die. Thats the condition were born on.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, From Elfland to Poughkeepsie
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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 ships systems, like a mechanical sea
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth
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...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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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What to make of a diminished thing?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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You're trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isnt suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Justice, mercy, does Mars care for them?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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Its always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Dont make changes, dont risk disapproval, dont upset your syndics. Its always easiest to let yourself be governed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human beings natural incentive to workhis initiative, his spontaneous creative energyand 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. He
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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It doesnt make any difference if his end is good; means are all weve got
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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 mens acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the rivers relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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[...]falcon-winged, falcon-mad, like an unfalling arrow, like an unforgotten thought.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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By solitude the soul escapes from doing or suffering magic; it escapes from dullness, from boredom, by being aware. Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be irritating, but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Si no quieres o no puedes imaginar los resultados de tus acciones, no hay manera de que actes moral o responsablemente. Los nios pequeos no pueden hacerlo; los bebs son monstruos moralmente totalmente codiciosos. Hay que instruir a su imaginacin en la previsin y la empata.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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A medida que un hombre adquiere ms poder y sabidura, se le estrecha el camino, hasta que al fin no elige, y hace pura y simplemente lo que tiene que hacer...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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What is hard is to keep alive on a world you don't belong to.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Planet of Exile
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Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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But belief is the wound that knowledge heals, and death begins the Telling of our life
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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We strike a medium, and he shivers in his bag, while I swelter in mine, but considering from what distances we have come together, we do well enough.
 Ursula Le Guin - Left Hand of Darkness
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They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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They were my age, but wed reached our age by different roads. What
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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Then I saw . . . you see . . . I saw that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't save each other. Or ourselves.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.  CHUANG TSE : XXIII
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Pero tan inevitablemente como el futuro se convierte en pasado, el pasado se convierte en futuro. Renegar del pasado no es triunfar.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Los mundos de Ursula K. Le Guin
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Theres a point, around age twenty, Bedap said, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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The unknown, said Faxes soft voice in the forest, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion... . Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitablethe one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine? That we shall die. Yes. Theres really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer... . The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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As for the doctor's mind, though intelligent and certainly well-meaning, it was a jumble of intellectual artifacts even more confusing than all the gadgets, appliances, and coneniences that filled the ship. These latter Shevek found entertaining; everything was so lavish, stylish, and inventive; but the furniture of Kimoe's intellect he did not find so comfortable. Kimoe's ideas never seemed to be able to go in a straight line; they had to walk around this and avoid that. There were walls around all his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of them, though he was perpetually hiding behind them.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Lovecraft dangles like a rabbit from the jaws of his unconscious.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Our border now is no line between two hills, but the line our planet makes in circling the Sun.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Our finest method of organized forgetting is called discovery.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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A writer who wants to write good stuff needs to read great stuff. If you dont read widely, or read only writers in fashion at the moment, youll have a limited idea of what can be done with the English language.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
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If Im pushed, I will push back. And Ive been pushed quite a lot.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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No entendan que uno tiene que ponerse del lado de los ganadores, o perder. Y es el hombre el que gana, siempre. El viejo conquistador.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Los mundos de Ursula K. Le Guin
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Ged said at last, speaking low, "There is a thing that I fear, Estarriol. I fear it more if you are with me when I go. There in the Hands in the dead end of the inlet I turned upon the shadow, it was within my hands' reach, and I seized it - I tried to seize it. And there was nothing I could hold. I could not defeat it. It fled, I followed. But that may happen again, and yet again. I have no power over the thing. There may be neither death nor triumph to end this quest; nothing to sing of; no end. It may be I must spend my life running from sea to sea and land to land on an endless vain venture, a shadow-quest.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Never fear. It is much easier for men to act than to refrain from
acting. We will continue to do good and to do evil... But if there were
a king over us all again and he sought counsel of a mage, as in the
days of old, and I were that mage, I would say to him: My lord, do
nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do
nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must
do and which you cannot do in any other way.
 Ursula Le Guin
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En ese curso de Historia Aplicada que segu cuando me preparaba para el All Lejos, decan que la esclavitud nunca dio resultado. Que era antieconmica.
De acuerdo, pero esto no es esclavitud, mi querido Ok. Los esclavos son seres humanos. Cuando cran vacas, llamas a eso esclavitud? No. Y da resultado.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Los mundos de Ursula K. Le Guin
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Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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talking about the meaning of a story, we need to be careful not to diminish it, impoverish it. A story can say different things to different people. It may have no definitive reading. And a reader may find a meaning in it that the writer never intended, never imagined, yet recognizes at once as valid.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The racism, misogyny, and counter-rationality of the reactionary right in American politics for the last several years is a frightening exhibition of the destructive force of anger deliberately nourished by hate, encouraged to rule thought, invited to control behavior. I hope our republic survives this orgy of self-indulgent rage.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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lmden korkuyordum. lmden o kadar korkuyordum ki belki de lyorsunuzdur diye, size bakamyordum bile. Benim iin lmemenin, eer bulabilirsem, bir... bir yolu olduundan baka hibir ey dnemiyordum. Fakat, sanki byk bir yara varm da kanyormu gibi, -sizinki gibi- hayat srekli akp gidiyordu. Fakat her eyde bu vard. Ve ben hibir ey, hibir ey yapmadm; sadece lmenin korkusundan saklanmaya altm.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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El mundo siempre es nuevo dijo Coro Mena por muy viejas que sean sus races. Selver, qu pasa entonces con esas criaturas? Parecen hombres y hablan como hombres. No son hombres?
No lo s. Acaso el hombre mata al hombre, excepto en un ataque de locura? Acaso mata la bestia a los de su especie? Slo los insectos. Estos yumenos nos matan con la misma indiferencia con que nosotros matamos vboras. El que me ense a m deca que se matan unos a otros, en disputas individuales, y tambin en grupos, como las hormigas cuando pelean. Eso yo no lo he visto. Pero s que no escuchan a quienes piden clemencia. Asestan golpes de gracia sobre la cabeza gacha, yo lo he visto! Hay en ellos necesidad de matar, y por eso me pareci natural condenarlos a muerte.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Los mundos de Ursula K. Le Guin
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Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life- of a sort, for a while.
 Ursula K. Le Guinn, Tales from Earthsea
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I was willing to believe him that most modern writing was trash, on the evidence that so much old writing was trash; but I didn't put it that way to him.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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Kafamda bu dusunceler gecip duruyordur, kalbim parcalanmisti, perisandi, cevremdeki insanlarla sevinmek istiyor, ama bunu yapamiyordum. Kendimi bir hain gibi hissediyordum, o buyuk hatayi ben yapmisim gibi, buna bizzat kendi, varligim ve kisiligimle ben neden olmusum gibi. Annem insanin kendi kendine acimasina neden olan o sucluluk duygusunu ogretmisti bana, hayatimin buyuk bir bolumunde bu duyguyu hep yasadim. Cocukca ve yanlis oldugunu bildigim icin bu duyguyla savastimsa da, o gerginlik ve baski altinda cocuklasmak, yanlis yapmak, tekrar bu duyguya yenik dusmek cok kolaydi.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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She told Everra that he had given her and Sallo the soul's hunger for books and thoughts, and must not deprive them now that Sallo was starving among the inanities of the silk rooms and she among the pomposities of merchants and the illiteracy of politicians.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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Krbalarn, para ve yolculuk hakk iin krekilik yapanlarn srtna hi indirmiyorlard, ama kimisi krbalanan, kimisi de krbalanmayan bir mrettebat arasnda pek arkadalk ortam oluturulamazd.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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My enemies must nominate themselves; I have no interest at all in making, finding, or knowing them.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Not Afraid. I knew you were a person who ... wouldn't be forced.... Well, yes, I was afraid. I was afraid of you. Not of making a mistake. I knew it wasn't a mistake. But you were-yourself. You aren't like most people, you know. I was afraid of you because I knew you were my equal.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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The insistent permissiveness of the late twentieth century had produced fully as much sex-guilt and sex-fear in its heirs as had the insistent repressiveness of the late nineteenth century.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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When I was young I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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the good cat with bad paws. The paws get him into trouble and cause loud shouting and scoldings and seizures and removals, which the good cat endures with patient good humor What are they carrying on about? I didnt knock that over. A paw did. There used to be a lot of small delicate things on shelves around the house. There arent now.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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You see, I dont write the way I was trained to write at the conservatory. I write dysfunctional music.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names  Mars 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 stormcloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they arent people. They dont love and hate, they arent for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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The world is always new, said Coro Mena, however old its roots.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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No entiendo por qu hay expertos en esvis que se alistan como voluntarios para una Colonia Abierta. T no ignoras que la gente que ests estudiando va a ser explotada, y probablemente exterminada. Es algo que est en la naturaleza humana, y sabes que eso no puedes cambiarlo. Por qu entonces vienes a observar qu pasa? Masoquismo?
No s qu es la "naturaleza humana". Quiz sea parte de esa naturaleza humana dejar descripciones de aquello que exterminamos. Es tanto ms agradable para un eclogo, realmente?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Los mundos de Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Until that moment Vetch had watched him with an anxious dread, for he was not sure what had happened there in the dark land. He did not know if this was Ged in the boat with him, and his hand had been for hours ready to the anchor, to stave in the boat's planking and sink her there in midsea, rather than carry back to the harbors of Earthsea the evil thing that he feared might have taken Ged's look and form. Now when he saw his friend and heard him speak, his doubt vanished. And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Ea, which is the oldest song, it is said, "Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky." That song Vetch sang aloud now as he held the boat westward, going before the cold wind of the winter night that blew at their backs from the vastness of the Open Sea.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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. And where men worship these things and abase themselves before them, there evil breeds; there places are made in the world where darkness gathers, places given over wholly to the Ones whom we call Nameless, the ancient and holy Powers of the Earth before the Light, the powers of the dark, of ruin, of madness.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I don't know. 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven / The Dispossessed / The Wind's Twelve Quarters
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It might seem strange that on an island fifty miles wide, in a village under cliffs that stare out forever on the sea, a child may grow to manhood never having stepped in a boat or dipped his finger in salt water, but so it is. Farmer, goatherd, cattleherd, hunter or artisan, the landsman looks at the ocean as a salt unsteady realm that has nothing to do with him at all. The village two days' walk from his village is a foreign land, and the island a day's sail from his island is a mere rumor, misty hills seen across water, not solid ground like that he walks on.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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The false starts and futilities of the past years proved themselves to be groundwork, foundations, laid in the dark but well laid.
 Ursuala K. Le Guin
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patience with him either, always at him to hurry up and
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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- Vreau s stau cu tine, zise ea.
- Vreau s stau cu tine, o ngn el.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Planet of Exile
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Shevek" dedi. Yabanc biriyle konumaya balarken tutunabilecei bir dal uzatmak iin adn sylemek gelenektendi.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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 ships systems, like a mechanical sea.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Llor por los aos que haba perdido esclavizada a un mal intil. Lloraba de dolor, porque era libre.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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The usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears them out, discards them, gets a new model.
 Ursula K. Le Guinla
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Tcerea era ca o prezen ntre ei. Femeia nl capul i se uit la oiman.
- Ei - vorbi ea - n care pat s dorm, Ged? Al copilului sau al tu?
El i trase rsuflarea. Vorbi cu glas sczut.
- Al meu, dac vrei.
- Vreau.
Tcerea l stpnea. Tenar putea vedea efortul pe care-l fcea ca s se smulg din ea.
- Dac o s ai rbdare cu mine ...
- Am avut rbdare cu tine vreme de douzeci i cinci de ani - zise ea.
Se uit la el i ncepu s rd.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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Bir insann yeniden doabilmesi iin, lmesi gerekir Tenar. O taraftan grld kadar zor bir ey deil bu." Ged
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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There were people who swore as an art formperforming a dazzling juncture of the inordinate and the unexpected.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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...insofar as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void. But the void was there. This life lacked realness; it was hollow; the dream creating where there was no necessity to create, had worn thin and sleazy. If this was being, perhaps the void was better.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Pravic was not a good swearing language. It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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And the truth is that as a mans real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do . . .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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figurines and souvenirs and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Esta calamidad asolando las tierras. Las artes del hombre olvidadas. El cantor enmudecido. El ojo ciego. Y entonces? Un falso rey reinando. Reinando para siempre. Y sobre los mismos sbditos para siempre. No ms nacimientos; no ms vidas nuevas. No ms nios. Slo lo que es mortal engendra vida, Arren. Slo en la muerte hay renacimiento. El Equilibrio no es inmovilidad. Es un movimiento... un eterno devenir.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, La costa ms lejana
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This principle, getting it out of place, off-limits, the basic principle of swearing, I understand and approve.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Jo Walton: Among Others
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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When we know that it's a planet just like this one, only with a better climate and worse people--when we know they're all propertarians, and fight wars, and make laws, and eat while other starve, and anyhow are all getting older and having bad luck and getting rheumatic knees and corns on their toes just like people there...when we know all that, why does it still look so happy--as if life there must be happy?..."... "If you can see the whole thing," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives....But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the art is, is to see it as the moon. They way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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 is 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin Guin
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what I told them was 'a poem,' a thing made by a maker, a work of art, part history of long ago, part invention.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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Bu yzden gemi drt yla bakan Shevek, onlar yitirilmi olarak deil, Takver'le yaamlarnda kurduklar yapnn bir paras olarak grd. Zamana kar almaktansa zamanla birlikte almann iyi yan, diye dnd, zamann boa harcanmamasdr. Ac bile ie yaryor.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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. Weve made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we cant see them, because theyre part of our thinking.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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The insistent permissiveness of the late twentieth century had produced fully as much sex-guilt and sex-fear in its heirs as had the insistent repressiveness of the late nineteenth century. Orr
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Konserler: bir vahiydi sanki, cokudan gelen bir aknlkt.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isnt any. Not from intellectual excellence, he hasnt any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! Thats the power structure hes part of, and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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To him a thinking man's job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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En yalnz deneyim olan ac, sempati ve sevgiyi dourur; benlik ve teki arasndaki kpry, birlemenin aralarn.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Kadnlar, Ryalar, Ejderhalar
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Later, when Ged thought back upon that night, he knew that had none had touched him when he lay thus spirit-lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet in that wisdom Ged saw something akin to his own power, something that went as deep as wizardry. 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 greet slow gestures of trees.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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(some Frenchman said that the cat is the soul of the house, and we agree).
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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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. It's unwise, though, to think you know how it's going to go, or how it's going to end. That's to be known only when it's over.
And even when it's over, even when it's somebody else's life, somebody who lived a hundred years ago, whose story I've heard told time and again, while I'm hearing it I hope and fear as if I didn't know how it would end; and so I live the story and it lives in me. That's as good a way as I know to outwit death. Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
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Let me ask you this, Mr. Ai: do you know, by your own experience, what patriotism is? No, I said, shaken by the force of that intense personality suddenly turning itself wholly upon me. I dont think I do. If by patriotism you dont mean the love of ones homeland, for that I do know. No, I dont mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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She went to the door and stood half inside, half outside for a while, listening to the creek shouting and hollering eternal praise! eternal praise! It was incredible that it had kept up this tremendous noise for hundreds of years before she was ever born, and would go on doing it until the mountains moved. And the strangest thing about it, was a distant note in it, far away upstream it seemed, like the voices of unborn children singing, very sweetly...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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But I know that to me words are things, almost immaterial but actual and real things, and that I like them. I like their most material aspect: the sound of them, heard in the mind or spoken by the voice. And right along with that, inseparably, I like the dances of meaning words do with one another, the endless changes and complexities of their interrelationships in sentence or text, by which imaginary worlds are built and shared. Writing engages me in both these aspects of words, in an inexhaustible playing, which is my lifework. Words are my mattermy stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood. Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake. I eat it, and I still have it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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He took pleasure in her inconsequential talk just as he did in the sunshine and the snow.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Yirmi ya dolaylarnda yle bir an vardr ki," dedi Bedap, "yaamnn geri kalan ksm boyunca ya herkes gibi olmay, ya da farkllklarn erdeme dntrmeyi semen gerekir.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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 'They eat their kind,' he said, 'Like men.'
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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kisi de ayrlk yznden ac ekmilerdi, epeyce ac ekmilerdi, ama ikisi de ballklarndan kaarak acy reddetmeyi dnmemilerdi.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are. How
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Later, when Ged thought back upon that night, he knew that had none had touched him when he lay thus spirit-lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet in that wisdom Ged saw something akin to his own power, something that went as deep as wizardry. 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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put it this way: fictionwriting it, reading itis an act of the imagination.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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I'm a part of it. Not separate from it. I walk on the ground and the ground's walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Consider: Anyone can turn his hand to anything. This sounds very simple, but its psychological effects are incalculable. 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. Consider: A child has no psycho-
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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KEEP READING books and seeing movies where nobody can fucking say anything except fuck, unless they say shit.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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[H.G. Wells said] that his method was "to trick his reader into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds." Such prestidigitation is a characteristic ploy of science fiction: to make a nonexistent entity or impossible premise acceptable (often by scientific-sounding terms such as telepathy, extraterrestrial, cavorite, FTL speed) and then follow through with a genuinely realistic, logically coherent description of the effects and implications.

Of course the accurate narrative description of the nonexistent is a basic device of all fiction. The extension to the impossible is proper to fantasy, but since we seldom know with certainty what is or is not possible, it is a legitimate element of science fiction too. What if? is a question asked by both science fiction and experimental science, and they share their method of answering it: make a postulate and then carefully observe its consequences.

- Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Every so often somebody writes a story or novel in the second person under the impression that it hasnt been done before.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
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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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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They just came to look, as if she were the Great Tower in Rodarred, or the Canyon of the Tulaevea. A phenomenon, a monument. They were awed, adoring. She snarled at them: Think your own thoughts!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Day Before the Revolution
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Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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Talking about it changed it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despairConsider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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This thing is nothing to do with us. This thing is wilderness. The civilised human mind's relationship to it is imprecise, fortuitous and full of risk. There are no shortcuts. All the analogies run in one direction, our direction...The mind can imagine that shadow of a few leaves falling in the wilderness; the mind is a wonderful thing. But what about all the shadows of all the other leaves on all the other branches on all the other scrub oaks on all the other rides of all the wilderness? Could you imagine those for even a moment? What good would it do? Infinite good.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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Ini and Aevi were entranced by his description of a curriculum that included farming, cparnetry, sewage reclamation, printing, plumbing, road mending, playwriting, and al the other occupations of the adult community, and by his admission that nobody was ever punished for anything.
Though sometimes, he said, they make you go away by yourself for a while.
But what, Oiie said abruptly, as if the question, long kept back, burst from him under pressure, what keeps people in order? Why dont they rob and murder each other?
Nobody owns anything to rob. If you want things you take them from the depository,. As for violence, well, I dont know, Oiie; would you mruder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercsion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.
All right, but how do you et peopled to do the dirty work?
What dirty work? asked Oiies wife, not following.
Garbage collecting, grave digging, Oiie said. Sheik added, Mercury mining, and nearly said, Shit processing, but recollected the Ioti taboo on scatological words. He had reflected, quite early in his stay on Urras, that the Urasti lived among mountains of excrement, but never mentioned shit.
Well, we all do them. But nobody has to do them for very long, unless he likes the work. One day in each decade the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work; they make rotating lists. Then the disagreeable work postings, or dangerous ones like the mercury mines and mills, normally theyre for one half year only.
But then the whole personal must consist of people just learning the job.
Yes. Its not efficient, but what else is to be done? You cant tell a man to work on a job that will cripple him or kill him in a few years. Why should he do that?
He can refuse the order?
Its not an order, Oiie. He goes to Divlab- the Division of Labor office- and says, I want to do such and such, what have you got? And they tell him where there are jobs.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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There are no right answers to wrong questions
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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spare time is the time not spent at your job or at otherwise keeping yourself
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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The lynx lives at the High Desert Museum. Briefly, when he was a kitten somebody pulled out his claws (declawing a cat is the same as pulling out a human beings fingernails and toenails or cutting off the last joint of each toe and finger). Then they pulled out his four great cat fangs. Then they pretended he was their itty-bitty kitty. Then they got tired of him, or got scared of him, and dumped him. He was found starving.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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..all I understand about living is having your work to do, and being able to do it. That's the pleasure, and the glory, and all. And if you can't do the work, or it's taken from you, then what's any good? You have to have something...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter. The following must
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Birbirimize geldik. Her zaman bunu yaptk. Byk uzaklklar, yllar, rastlant uurumlarn aarak. Bu kadar uzaktan geldii iin artk kimse bizi ayramaz. Hibir ey, hibir uzaklk, hibir zaman aral zaten aramzda olan uzakl, cinsiyetlerimizin uzakln, varlklarmzn, akllarmzn farklln aamaz; bir bakla, bir dokunula, dnyadaki en kolay eyle, bir szckle zerinde bir kpr kuruverdiimiz o boluu, o uurumu..
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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To go was not enough for him, only half enough; he must come back. In such a tendency was already foreshadowed, perhaps, the nature of the immense exploration he was to undertake into the extremes of the comprehensible. He would most likely not have embarked on that years-long enterprise had he not had profound assurance that return was possible, even though he himself might not return; that indeed the very nature of the voyage, like a circumnavigation of the globe, implied return. You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the rivers relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Fantasy as an assembly-line commodity leaves me cold.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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I had of course met with incredulity..., but seldom with a will to incredulity.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The fundamental unity of the Sequence and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe. How could he have stared at reality for ten years and not seen it? There would be no trouble at all in going on. Indeed he had already gone on. He was there. He saw all that was to come in this first, seemingly casual glimpse of the method, given him by his understanding of a failure in the distant past. The wall was down. The vision was both clear and whole. What he saw was simple, simpler than anything else. It was simplicity: and contained in it all complexity, all promise. It was revelation. It was the way clear, the way home, the light.

The spirit in him was like a child running out into the sunlight. There was no end, no end. ...

And yet in his utter ease and happiness he shook with fear; his hands trembled, and his eyes filled up with tears, as if he had been looking into the sun. After all, the flesh is not transparent. And it is strange, exceedingly strange, to know that one's life has been fulfilled. Yet he kept looking, and going farther, with that same childish joy, until all at once he could not go any farther; he came back, and looking around through his tears saw that the room was dark and the high windows were full of stars.

The moment was gone; he saw it going. He did not try to hold on to it. He knew he was part of it, not it of him. He was in its keeping.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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My advice to young writers is, if you cant marry money, at least dont marry envy.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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Contrast J. D. Salingers 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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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Which of us saved the other from the Labyrinth, Ged?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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The strange fortune of my lynx brought him to live in an artificial environment, a human community utterly foreign to him. His isolation from his natural, complex wilderness habitat is grievous and unnatural. But his aloofness, his aloneness, is the truth of his own nature. He retains that nature, brings it among us unchanged. He brings us the gift of his indestructible solitude.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Before long, if you didnt poison your teenage brain with absinthe or withdraw to a cork-lined room, you were expected at least to indulge in alienation, alcoholism, bullfights, or suicide. German and Austrian artists started with an unfair advantage, in that their whole society was fairly toxic. Mahler, Richard Strauss, Thomas Mann, even Rilke: men of immense talent immersed in a cultural neuroticism, a wooing of perversity, disease, and death.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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Keeping grows; giving flows.' Giving involves a good deal of discrimination; as a business it requires a more disciplined intelligence that keeping, perhaps...Books are mortal. They die. A book is an act; it takes place in time, not just in space. It is not information, but relation.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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The elimination of war. Did the Ancient Hainish postulate that continuous sexual capacity and organized social aggression, neither of which are attributes of any mammal but man, are cause and effect?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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She was so elaborately and ostentatiously a female body that she seemed scarcely to be a human being.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Pois eu tinha me esquecido de tanta luz que h no mundo, at voc devolv-la a mim.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I do not know what makes a man a traitor. No man considers himself a traitor: this makes it hard to find out.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Le Guins Rule: One person cannot do two fulltime jobs, but two persons can do three fulltime jobs  if they honestly share the work.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friends voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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...the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don't cooperate--we obey.

We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear ur neighbor's opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice.
...
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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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To keep dark the mind of the mage born, that is a dangerous thing.
 Ursala K. LeGuin
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The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I write science fiction because that is what publishers call my books. Left to myself, I should call them novels.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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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 mens acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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When the artist an the audience are together, collaboration on the work becomes mundane and actual; the work shapes itself in the speaker's voice and the listeners' response together. This powerful relationship can be, and in politics frequently is, abused: the speaker may appropriate the power to himself, dominating and exploiting the audience. When the power of the relationship is used not abused, when the trust is mutual, as when a parent tells a bedtime story or a teacher shares the treasures of the intellect or a poet speaks both to and for the listeners, real community is achieved; the occasion is scared.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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I'm afraid of life! There are times I--I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn't all a misunderstanding-- this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain... If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could... get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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You shall not go down good twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You CAN go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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Dnyann ne kadar gzel olduunu grmenin yolu, onu ay gibi grmekten geiyor. Yaamn ne gzel olduunu grmenin yolu lmn bak asndan bakmaktan geiyor.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin
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Everyone is important, Sue said I learned that this summer.
Was that the truth that the croaking voice had gasped at tortures end? She didnt believe it. Nobody was important. But she couldnt say that. It would sound as cheap, as stupid, as the stupid professor. But the pebble wasnt important, neither was she, neither was Sue. Neither was the sea. Important wasnt the point. Things didnt have rank.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth
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There is no break in the wholeness of time.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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You dont see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling? No To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question. I
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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some men who live hard and in good health cant believe sickness or weakness is anything but laziness, a sham.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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What is it like to return from the dead? Not easy. Not for the one who returns, nor for his people. The place he occupied in their world has closed up, ceased to be, filled with accumulated change, habit, the doings and needs of others. He has been replaced. To return from the dead is to be a ghost: a person for whom there is no room.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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The unknown...the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought...The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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 ships systems, like a mechanical sea
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Some five hundred people lived there. Four thousand years ago I should have found their ancestors living in the same place, in the same kind of house. Along in those four millennia the electric engine was developed, radios and power looms and power vehicles and farm machinery and all the rest began to be used, and a Machine Age got going, gradually, without any industrial revolution, without any revolution at all.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Oponerse a la vulgaridad es inevitablemente ser vulgar. Hay que ir a alguna otra parte; hay que tener otra meta; entonces el camino es distinto.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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...The duty of the individual is to accept No rule, t be the intitiator 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 membrs ofa society foudned upon revolution. Revolution is our obligationl our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it seen as having any end, it will never truly being.' We can't stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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What you wrote above the nightingale is so interesting, Mr. Keats, please tell us more.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing
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He had no answer. He had no right to all the grace and bounty of this world, earned and maintained by the work, the devotion, the faithfulness of its people. Paradise is for those who make Paradise. He did not belong. He was a frontiersman, one of a breed who had denied their past, their history. The settlers of Anarres had turned their backs on the Old World and its past, opted for the future only. But as surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future. To deny is not to achieve. The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forgo the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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If plain men hide their true name from all but a few they love and trust utterly, so much more must wizardly men, being more dangerous, and more endangered. 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 that gift only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakable trust.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.
 Ursala K. Le Guin
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As a man's knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower; until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholely what he must do.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Winter hasnt achieved in thirty centuries what Terra once achieved in thirty decades. Neither has Winter ever paid the price that Terra paid.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Power inheres in a center. You're going to the center.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Do what is needful. And no more!
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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the sure, quick, and lasting way to make people into a nation: war. His
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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She was enjoying herself. The Black Widow pursues her prey. Why hadnt 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 didnt have it. She had a sneaky, sly, shy, squamous personality. She had French diseases of the soul.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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It is our Puritanism, insisting that discipline means repression or punishment, which confuses the subject. To discipline something, in the proper sense of the word, does not mean to repress it, but to train it - to encourage it to grow, and act, and be fruitful, whether it is a peach tree or a human mind.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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He was all alone, and nothing seemed to be real in solitude.
 Ursula Le Guin
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What is love of ones country; is it hate of ones uncountry? Then its not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? Thats a good thing, but one mustnt make a virtue of it, or a profession...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I see no opposition between accepting the theory of evolution and believing in God. The intellectual acceptance of a scientific theory and the belief in a transcendent deity have little or no overlap: neither can support or contradict the other. They rise from profoundly different ways of looking at the same worlddifferent ways of coming at reality: the material and the spiritual. They can and often do coexist in perfect harmony.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The nod of a head is such a small thing, it can mean so little, yet it is the gesture of assent that allows, that makes to be. The nod is the gesture of power, the yes. The numen. the presence of the sacred, is called by its name.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that recognition of each person's solitude which alone transcends it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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A poem or story consciously written to address a problem or bring about a specific result, no matter how powerful or beneficent, has abdicated its first duty and privilege, its responsibility to itself. Its primary job is simply to find the words that give it its right, true shape. That shape is its beauty and its truth.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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Deux tres unis par un profond amour n'ont-ils pas des chances de se faire mal non moins profondment? N'en ont-ils pas le pouvoir?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Not even need and love can defeat fate, Lavinia. Aeneas' gift is to know his fate, what he must do, and do it. In spite of need. In spite of love.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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No matter how humble the spirit its offered in, a sermon is an act of aggression.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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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!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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A Modest Proposal: Vegempathy
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Everything is old, here. We are old - the Masters."
"You're not," Irian said. She thought him between thirty and forty[...]
"But I came far. Miles can be years.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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To believe that our beliefs are permanent truths which encompass reality is a sad ignorance. To let go of that belief is to find safety.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling:
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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A writer's moral duty is to use language thoughtfully and well.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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There is nothing, the Ice says, but Ice.  But the young volcano there to northward has another word it thinks of saying.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he's just had a woman or just killed another man. That wasn't original, he'd read it in some old books; but it was true. That was why he liked to imagine scenes like that. Even if the creechies weren't actually men.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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I hated him at such times, with a hatred that rose straight up out of the death that lay within my spirit. I hated the harsh, intricate, obstinate demands that he made on me in the name of life.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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[T]he status of women in a society is a pretty reliable index of the degree of civilization of that society.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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Injustice makes the rules and courage breaks them.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Wie hat man ein Land? Wie liebt man es? [...] Ich kenne Menschen, ich kenne Stdte, Farmen, Berge, Flsse und Felsen, und ich wei, wie bei einem Sonnenuntergang im Herbst die Sonnenstrahlen auf ein bestimmtes Stck Ackerland an einem Abhang fallen. Doch welchen Sinn hat es, all dem eine Grenze zu geben, all dem einen Namen zu geben und dort, wo der Name nicht mehr zutrifft, aufzuhren, es schn zu finden? Was ist das, Liebe zum eigenen Land? Ist es der Ha auf das eigene Nicht-Land? Dann wre sie wahrhaftig nichts Gutes. Ist es vielleicht ganz schlicht und einfach Eigenliebe? Das ist etwas Gutes, aber man darf weder eine Tugend daraus machen, noch einen Beruf ...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Earthsea The Left Hand of Darkness: Two BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisations
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she sipped her coffee and brandy, which would have grown hair on a Chihuahua. There
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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We're prisoners, so freedom is a thing we study.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I had believed that justice could exist in a society founded on injustice.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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The Yomeshta would say that mans singularity is his divinity. Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be the cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Hate eats the hater
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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Well, see, I was thinking, let's say you throw a rock at something. At a tree. You throw it, and it goes through the air and hits the tree. Right? But it can't. Becausecan I have the slate? Look, here's you throwing the rock, and here's the tree... that's supposed to be a tree, and here's the rock, see, halfway in between. To get from you to the tree, the rock has to be halfway in between you and the tree, doesn't it. And then it has to be halfway between halfway and the tree. And then it has to be halfway between that and the tree. It doesn't matter how far it's gone, there's always a place, only it's a time really, that's halfway between the last place it was and the tree
It doesn't matter how you aim it. It can't reach the tree.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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This is morally problematic when personal decision is confused with personal opinion.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Hija de un antroplogo, esta disciplina influy en su concepcin del hombre involucrado en culturas que le son ajenas. Su obra puede ser vista como un amplio fresco antropolgico-fantstico.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, El da antes de la revolucin
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The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tiny time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model... .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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A man who doesnt detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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 ones country; is it hate of ones uncountry? Then its not a good thing.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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For those who seek allegory, it must be maddening. (It must be allegory! Of course Frodo is Christ! - or is Gollum Christ?) for those whose grasp on reality is so tenuous that they crave ever-increasing doses of "realism" in their reading, it offers nothing - unless, perhaps, a shortcut to the looney bin.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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Only shadow can fight shadow.Only darkness can defeath the dark.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption and make us look up and see- with terror or with relief- that the world does not, in fact, belong to us at all.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you write science fiction you can spell things the way you like, sometimes.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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I share your modest enthusiasm for Austens Mansfield Park. I didnt like the movie, though. Do you like any of the recent Jane movies? Oh, as movies, sure. Not as Austen. There is no way I can dislike Alan whatshisname with the voice like a cello.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wild Girls
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Only shadow can fight shadow.Only darkness can defeat the dark.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Grne baklrsa zaman yalnzca bilinli olduumuzda alglyoruz. Bir bebek iin zaman yoktur; gemile arasndaki uzakl lemez, gemiin u anla nasl bir iliki iinde olduunu anlamaz, u ann geleceiyle nasl ilikili olacan planlayamaz. Zamann getiini bilmez; lm anlamaz. Erikinin bilinsiz akl da onun gibidir. Dte zaman yoktur, sreklilik tmyle deimitir, neden ve sonu birbirine karr. Mit ve efsanede zaman yoktur. Masal 'Bir zamanlar' derken hangi gemiten bahseder? Bylece gizemci, mantyla bilinaltn yeniden birletirdiinde her eyin tek bir varlk olduunu grr ve sonsuz geri dn anlar.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Once you are there, once you walk through the wall with me, then as I see it you are one of us. We are responsible to you and you to us; you become an Anarresti, with the same options as all the others. But they are not safe options. Freedom is never very safe.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Pasternaks Doctor Zhivago
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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We who live by writing and publishing wantand should demandour fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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I dont know a novel like Charles L. McNichols Crazy Weather. I dont think there could be one. Its a book written out of a unique knowledge and life experience in a place way off the beaten track. Its singularity is both its virtue and its bane. The book thats unlike any other has no ready-made niche in the shelves of the store, the library, or the mind of the literary critic. But such a book often has a unique place in the hearts of readers fortunate enough to find it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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I, who am old, who have done what I must do, who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know that there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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People picked up burning knots and embers with their bare hands and hurled them into the pyre, shouting and screaming in what appeared to be pure, uncontrolled rage. The dead mans granddaughter yelled over and over, How could you do this to me? How could you go and die? You didnt really love me! Ill never forgive you!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes: Stories
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He had made follow him. He had called her by her name, and she had come crouching to his hand.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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Siding more with Keats on this point, I generally avoid such fictionshence both my liking for nonrealist writers and my initial reluctance to trust Saramagos painfully ugly story.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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...his loyalty had grown greater, being fixed upon a greater model and a broader hope. He had learned his own weakness also, and by it had learned to measure his strength; and he knew that he was strong. But what use was strength if he had no gift, nothing to offer, still, to his lord but his service and his steady love? Where they were going, would those be enough?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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moieties
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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But it is not only there, not in death only that men take their names. Those who can be most hurt the most vulnerable; those who have given love and do not take it back, they can speak each other's names. The faithful-hearted, the givers of life. . . .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Det som frblir ofrndrat fr lnge frstr sig sjlv. Skogen r evig drfr att den dr och dr och drfr lever." (s. 319)
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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People need God the way a three-year-old needs a chainsaw.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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The unexpected is what makes life possible, he said.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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If your strength is only the others weakness, you live in fear,
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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If memory remains sound and the thinking mind retains its vigor, an old intelligence may have extraordinary breadth and depth of understanding.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Arren saw the world now with his companion's eyes and saw the living splendor that was revealed about them in the silent, desolate land, as if by a power of enchantment surpassing any other, in every blade of the wind-bowed grass, every shadow, every stone. So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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We tried mindspeech again. I had never before sent repeatedly to a total non-receiver. The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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He patted the thing he wore on his belt, a metal object like a deformed penis, and looked patronizingly at the unarmed woman.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Because I did see him. And not you. You're almost nothing in my poem, almost nobody. An unkept promise. No mending that now, no filling your name with life, as I filled Didos. But its there, that life ungiven, there, in you. So now, at the end, when its too late, you have it to give to me.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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A living body suffers pain. . . . a living body grows old; it dies. Death is the price we pay for our life and for all life.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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His eyes saved him. What they insisted on seeing and reporting to him took him out of the autism of terror.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Somehow is a super-weasel, a word that betrays that the author didnt want to bother thinking out the storySomehow
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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I never thought before, said Tirin unruffled, of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, Look, theres the Moon. Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth.

Where, then, is Truth? declaimed Bedap, and yawned.

In the hill one happens to be sitting on, said Tirin.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Endurance may outlast hope.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Mais quand l'esprit devient conscient, quand la vitesse de l'volution augmente, alors il faut faire attention - faire attention au monde. Il faut apprendre la manire, l'art, les limites. Un esprit conscient doit tre une partie du tout, volontairement, et en prenant des prcautions... Comme le rocher est inconsciemment une partie de l'ensemble. Comprenez-vous? Cela a-t-il un sens pour vous?
 Ursula LE GUIN
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Bright fame, bright glory will crown Lavinia. But she brings her people war.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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It is hard to doubt that the cramped, ugly, filthy, noisy, disorganised surroundings of slums and poor barrios foster depression and anger in children who live in them, and limit and darken their perception of the world as a whole. All the same, their awareness of human interdependence and mutual responsibility may be far more intense than that of the middle-class child brought up with a room of her own.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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To be the man he can be, Ged has to find out who and what his real enemy is. He has to find out what it means to be himself. That requires not a war but a search and a discovery. The search takes him through mortal danger, loss, and suffering. The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isnt the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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No ideologues, not even religious ones, are going to be happy with Tolkien, unless they manage it by misreading him. For like all great artists he escapes ideology by being too quick for its nets, too complex for its grand simplicities, too fantastic for its rationality, too real for generalizations.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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- [...] No sirve de nada tener una respuesta cuando la pregunta est equivocada. [...] Lo desconocido [...], lo imprevisto, lo indemostrable... el fundamento de la vida. La ignorancia es el campo del pensamiento. Lo indemostrable es el campo de la accin. [...] Qu se sabe? Qu hay de cierto en este mundo, predecible, inevitable, lo nico cierto que se sabe del futuro de usted, y del mo?

- Que moriremos.

- S. Slo una pregunta tiene respuesta, [...] y ya conocemos la respuesta... La vida es posible slo a causa de esa permanente e intolerable incertudumbre: no conocer lo que vendr (pp. 82-83).
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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the vehicle you arrived on, locked up where we cant see it, would it be possible, as suggested, for you to bring down your ... Star Ship? What do you call it? Ai: Star Ship is a good name, sir. Alshel: Oh? What do you call it?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
The little Otak was hiding in the rafters of the house, as it did when strangers entered. There it stayed while the rain beat on the walls and the fire sank down and the night wearing slowly along left the old woman nodding by the hearthpit. Then the otak crept down and came to Ged where he lay stretched stiff and still upon the bed. It began to lick his hands and wrists, long and patiently, with its dry leaf-brown tongue. Crouching beside his head it licked his temple, his scarred cheek, and softly his closed eyes. And very slowly under that soft touch Ged roused. He woke, not knowing where he had been or where he was or what was the faint grey light in the air about him, which was the light of dawn coming to the world. Then the otak curled up near his shoulder as usual, and went to sleep.

Later, when Ged thought back upon that night, he knew that had none touched him when he lay thus spirit-lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet in that wisdom Ged saw something akin to his own power, something that went as deep as wizardry. 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 to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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The means are the end, only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice...the separation of means and ends was false. For her as for him, there was no end. There was process: process was all.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Sbagliato. Non avrebbe dovuto ringraziarlo. I ringraziamenti erano locuzioni servili. I titoli onorifici e le insignificanti espressioni rituali di saluto, di commiato, di richiesta di permesso e di falsa gratitudine, per favore, grazie, non c' di che, addio, resti fossili di un'ipocrisia primitiva: tutti ostacoli che intralciavano un rapporto autentico e sincero tra i produttori-consumatori.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I had ignored that black cellar and gone looking for the substance of Orgoreyn aboveground, in daylight. No wonder nothing had seemed real. I
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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He liked the way she began her fierce, scornful sentences so often with a weak, conciliatory 'well.' She cut the ground out from under them before they ever got going, let them hang unsupported in the void. She had courage, great courage.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Vrlden r vldig och frunderlig,..., men den r inte vldigare eller mer frunderlig n vrt medvetande. (s. 65)
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
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At dawn I was awake and saw that we had left everything behind except rock, and ice, and light, and the narrow road always going up and up under our treads. I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Lendas sobre previses so comuns em toda a Famlia Humana. Deuses falam, espritos falam, computadores falam.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Mo Esquerda da Escurido
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Let my lord be. He has saved us all, and doing so has spent his strength and maybe his life with it. Let him be!"

So Arren spoke, fiercely and with command. He had been overawed and frightened too much, he had been filled up with fear, and had got sick of it and would not have it any more. He was angry with the dragon for its brute strength and size, its unjust advantage. He had seen death, he had tasted death, and no threat had power over him.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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The nod of a head is such a small thing, it can mean so little, yet it is the gesture of assent that allows, that makes to be. The nod is the gesture of power, the yes. The numen, the presence of the sacred, is called by its name
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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The word power has two different meanings. There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge. And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others. Ged was offered both kinds of power. Tenar was offered only one. Heroic fantasy descends to us from an archaic world. I hadnt yet thought much about that archaism. My story took place in the old hierarchy of society, the pyramidal power structure, probably military in origin, in which orders are given from above, with a single figure at the top. This is the world of power over, in which women have always been ranked low. In such a world, I could put a girl at the heart of my story, but I couldnt give her a mans freedom, or chances equal to a mans chances. She couldnt be a hero in the hero-tale sense. Not even in a fantasy? No. Because to me, fantasy isnt wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality. After all, even in a democracy, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, after forty years of feminist striving, the reality is that we live in a top-down power structure that was shaped by, and is still dominated by, men. Back in 1969, that reality seemed almost unshakable. So I gave Tenar power overdominion, even godheadbut it was a gift of which little good could come. The dark side of the world was what she had to learn, as Ged had to learn the darkness in his own heart.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
  -- Ursula K Le Guin
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    .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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You know theres always prejudice in a revolutionary movement.
 Ursula Le Guin
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Fiction is really often much more useful than lived experience; it takes much less time, costs nothing (from the library), and it comes in a manageable, orderly form. You can understand it. Experience just steamrollers over you and you begin to see what happened only years and years later, if ever. Fiction is much better than reality at providing factual, psychological, and moral understanding.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
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George MacDonald: The Princess and the Goblin
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin
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Nr vi vat ngot blir vra handlingar starka och nr djupt. Nr vi inte knner rtta kursen blir vi frvirrade. Gr vilse, frslsar vrt arv.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Love doesnt just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. When
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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His words cost him so much, she thought, not like hers that just came dancing out of the air and went back into it. He spoke from his marrow. It made what he said a solemn compliment, which she accepted gratefully...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness
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In The Tombs of Atuan, the Old Powers, the Nameless Ones, appear as mysterious, ominous, and yet inactive. Arha/Tenar is their priestess, the greatest of all priestesses, whom the Godking himself is supposed to obey: But what is her realm? A prison in the desert. Women guarded by eunuchs. Ancient tombstones, a half-ruined temple, an empty throne. A fearful underground labyrinth where prisoners are left to die of starvation and thirst, where only she can walk the maze, where light must never come. She rules a dark, empty, useless realm. Her power imprisons her. This isnt the rosy reassurance many novels at the time offered adolescents. Its a very bleak picture of what a girl may expect. Arhas life is dreary, unchanging, with almost no experience of kindness except from Manan the eunuch. The third chapter may be the cruelest, most hopeless passage in all the Earthsea books. By consenting to the death of her prisoners, Arha locks the prison door upon herself. Her whole life will be lived in a trap.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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I lied. I lied. I lied. I lied deliberately, knowingly, well. She lied. She is a liar. She is an intellectual too! She is a lie. And a coward, afraid.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands
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He was not interested in detached knowledge, science for science's sake: there was no use learning anything if it was of no use. Relevance was his touchstone.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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The writer Moe Bowstern gave me a slogan I cherish: Subversion Through Friendliness. It looks silly till you think about it. It bears considerable thinking about. Subversion through terror, shock, pain is easyinstant gratification, as it were.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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...the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home. Takver
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Laime ir saistta ar loisko prtu, un tikai prts spj to novrtt. Man tika tas, ko cilvks nevar ne nopelnt, ne paturt, un biei vien pat nepazins saemanas brd, - sirds prieks.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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It may remain for us to learn that our task is only beginning, and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable and unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking;--that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;--that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;--and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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I was alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark palace, in a strange snow-changed city, in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Haber considered himself a lone wolf. He had never wanted marriage nor close friendships, he had chosen a strenuous research carried out when others sleep, he had avoided entanglements. He kept his sex life almost entirely to one-night stands, semipros, sometimes women and sometimes young men; he knew which bars and cinemas and saunas to go to for what he wanted. He got what he wanted and got clear again, before he or the other person could possibly develop any kind of need for the other. He prized his independence, his free will. But he found it terrible to be alone, all alone in the huge indifferent Park, hurrying, almost running, toward the Institute, because he did not have anywhere else to go. He got there and it was all silent, all deserted.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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You cannot buy the revolution/You cannot make the revolution/You can only BE the revolution! It is in your spirit/ or it is nowhere.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?' Ogion went on a halfmile or so, and said at last, 'To hear, one must be silent.
 Ursula Le Guin
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The Wild Winds of Possibility: Vonda McIntyres Dreamsnake
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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it is strange, exceedingly strange, to know that ones life has been fulfilled. Yet
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Bu karabasan caddesinin en garip yan da satlk milyonlarca eyin hibirinin orada yaplmyor olmasyd. Orada yalnzca satlyorlard. likler, oymaclar, boyaclar, tasarmclar, makineciler nrredeydi, eller neredeydi, yapan insanlar? Gzden uzak, baka bir yerde. Duvarlar arkasnda. Dkkanlardaki herkes ya alc, ya satcyd. Nesnelerle sahip olmak dnda bir ilikileri yoktu.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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The conduct of a new sedoretu is to some extent, and wisely, prescribed by custom and sanctioned by religion. The first night after the ceremony of marriage belongs to the Morning and Evening couples; the second night to the Day and Night couples. Thereafter the four spouses may join as and when they please, but always and only by invitation given and accepted, and the arrangements are to be known to all four. Four souls and bodies and all the years of their four lives to come are in the balance in each of those decisions and invitations; passion, negative and positive, must find its channels, and trust must be established, lest the whole structure fail to found itself solidly, or destroy itself in selfishness and jealousy and grief.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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He listened to the radio, but it would not listen to him. He was all alone, and nothing seemed to be real in solitude. He needed somebody, anybody, to talk to, he had to tell them what he felt so that he knew if he felt anything.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Fatos no so mais slidos, coerentes, perfeitos e reais do que prolas. Mas ambos so sensveis.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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If you can see a thing whole, he said, it seems that its always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a worlds all dirt and rocks. And day to day, lifes 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Kimoe stared at him, shocked out of politeness. But the loss ofof everything feminineof delicacyand the loss of masculine self-respect You cant pretend, surely, in your work, that women are your equals? In physics, in mathematics, in the intellect? You cant pretend to lower yourself constantly to their level?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Novelists probably talk less than any other kind of artist about beauty, because the word is seldom used to describe what they make.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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...was I to join them therefore? To let their acts rule my own? I will not make their choices for them, nor will I let them make mine for me!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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No sou servo de ningum. Um homem deve projetar a prpria sombra...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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In this effort to attain security, independence and privacy of course were suspect....
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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Jag skulle inte be en sjuk man att lpa kapplopp", sa Sparvhk. "Inte heller skulle jag lgga sten p en rygg som redan var fr tungt lastad". Det framgick inte tydligt om han tnkte p sig sjlv eller p vrlden i stort.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Hay tres aspectos de la ambisexualidad que hemos vislumbrado o entrevisto apenas, y que quiz nunca entendamos del todo.

Considrese: Cualquiera puede cambiarse en cualquiera de los dos sexos. Esto parece simple, pero los efectos psicolgicos son incalculables. El hecho de que cualquiera [...] pueda sentirse "atado a la crianza de los nios" [...] implica que nadie est tan "atado" aqu como pueden estarlo, psicolgicamente o fsicamente, las mujeres de otras partes. Las cargas y los privilegios son compartidos con bastante equidad: todos corren los mismos riesgos o tienen que afrontar las mismas decisiones. Por lo tanto nadie es aqu tan libre como un hombre libre de cualquier otra parte.

Considrese: No hay imposicin sexual, no hay violaciones. Como en la mayora de los mamferos no humanos el coito implica una invitacin y un consentimiento mutuos; de otro modo no es posible. La seduccin es por supuesto posible, pero slo con un extraordinario sentido de la oportunidad.

Considrese: No hay divisin de la humanidad en dos partes: fuerte/dbil; protector/protegido; dominante/sumiso; sujeto de propiedad/objeto de propiedad; activo/pasivo. En verdad toda esa tendencia al dualismo que empapa el pensamiento humano se encuentra aminorada, o cambiada, en Invierno (pp. 107-108)
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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A nica coisa que torna a vida possvel  a incerteza permanente e intolervel: no saber o que vem depois.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I fear liars, and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country well. Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts long enough.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Varln pnarlar, hayattan daha derindir, lmden de...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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... the whole world as it now is should be on my side, because I dreamed a lot of it up, too. Well, after all, it is on my side. That is, Im a part of it. Not separate from it. I walk on the ground and the grounds walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Felicidade tem a ver com a razo, s pode ser conquistada pela razo. O que ganhei foi uma coisa que no se pode conquistar, no se pode manter e, muitas vezes, no se pode nem reconhecer no momento; falo de jbilo.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Where, then, is Truth? declaimed Bedap, and yawned.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Hate's not functional; why are we taught it?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Um amor profundo entre duas pessoas envolve, afinal, o poder e a oportunidade de causar mgoa profunda.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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What we call 'evil' is produced by civilization, its constraints and repressions, deforming the spontaneous, free self-expression of the personality.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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I am not sure who I am," I said cautiously.

"Many people never are," she said. "But it doesn't matter, you know. If for one moment of your whole life you know that you are, then that's your life, that moment, that's unnua, that's all. In a short life I saw my mother's face, like the sun. So I'm here. In a long life I went there and there and there; but I dug in the garden, the root of a weed came up in my hand, so I am unnua. When you get old, you know, you keep being here instead of there, everything is here. Everything is here," she repeated.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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the entity of twenty-five, where it was warmest. We did not struggle for the warm place, we simply were in it each night. It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Kings are quick to punish, it relieves their anxiety.
 Ursula Le Guin
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I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Oh fool, oh desolation!" said the Prince of Kansas. "Ill give you ten women to accompany you to the Place of the Lie, with lutes and flutes and tambourines and contraceptive pills. I'll give you five good friends armed with firecrackers. I'll give you a dogin truth I will, a living extinct dog, to be your true companion. Do you know why dogs died out? Because they were loyal, because they were trusting. Go alone, man!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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The book is still filtering down through my emotional Melitta and I will have further reports later,
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Even among writers, not all seem to share my enjoyment of pursuing a word or a usage through the dictionaries and the wastebaskets. If I start doing it aloud in public, some of them look at me with horror or compassion, or try to go quietly away.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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Onlardan korkuyorsun nk lmden korkuyorsun hakl olarak: nk lm lm korkuntur ve lmden korkmak gerekir... Ve yaam da korkun bir eydir... ve yaamdan hem korkulmal hem de yaam vlmelidir.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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One day is the day for moving on, and overnight, the next day, there is no more good in moving on, because you have come where you were going to.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin
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The sleeper turns his back on everyone.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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                      , :

  ?

        ,            .

           .     ,   .  ,   ,    :     ,     ,    ,      .
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for lifes sake
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables,
the nightjars
Flashing into the dark.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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[T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time, but in the great rapids and the winding shallows no boat is safe.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
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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
 Ursula Le Guin
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recommend to all storytellers a watchful attitude and a thoughtful, careful choice of adjectives and adverbs, because the bakery shop of English is rich beyond belief, and narrative prose, particularly if its going a long distance, needs more muscle than fat.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
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...Orgota cooking was insipid; no harm in that. But why did the people I met, whether well or ill disposed towards me, also seem insipid? There were vivid personalities among themObsle, Slose, the handsome and detestable Gaumand yet each of them lacked some quality, some dimension of being; and they failed to convince. They were not quite solid.

It was, I thought, as if they did not cast shadows.

This kind of rather highflown speculation is an essential part of my job. Without some capacity for it I could not have qualified as a Mobile, and I received formal training in it on Hain, where they dignify it with the title of Farfetching. What one is after when farfetching might be described as the intuitive perception of a moral entirety; and thus it tends to find expression not in rational symbols, but in metaphor.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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For after all, he thought now, lying in the warmth of Takvers sleep, it was joy they were both afterthe completeness of being. If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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..he says, but that's wizard's talk, making things seem great by great words.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Would you walk away from Omelas?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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Go to bed; tired is stupid. Tomorrow
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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I did not live my life as history is written.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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La luz es la mano de la izquierda de la oscuridad,
y la oscuridad es la mano derecha de la luz.
Las dos son una, vida y muerte, juntas
como amantes en kmmer,
como manos unidas,
como el trmino y el camino (p. 256).
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The promotional material for Fourth Island is far more lavish and not at all defensive. From the Permanent Living Reenactment of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima to the Rockets Red Glare Four-Hour Fireworks Display every night, from the United We Stand Steak House by way of the statue-lined Avenue of the Presidents to the Under God Indivisible Prayer Chapel, it is all on a grand scale, and every last piece of it is red, white, blue, striped, and starred. The Great Joy Corporation is evidently expecting or receiving patriotic visitors in great numbers. Interactive displays of the Museum of Our Heroes, the Gun Show, and the All-American Victory Gardens (salvia, lobelia, candytuft) feature large on the Web site, where one can also at all times recite the Pledge of Allegiance interactively with a chorus
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes: Stories
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If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion...But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead. In
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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He, after all, had no standards of manliness, of virility, to complicate his pride.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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There's one way to make a baby. If you know another, you can do it with somebody else!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness
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Odo said it all her life. 'Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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He had been groping and grabbing after certainty, as if it were something he could possess. He had been demanding a security, a guarantee, which is not granted: and which, if granted, would become a prison.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal. There are two kinds of time,
local and historical.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness
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his heart going hard.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Rocannon's World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions
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Goodbye, goodbye. Fish and visitors stink after three days. Goodbye!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Rocannon's World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions
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Consistency is a virtue until it gets annoying
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth
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And in four years the first entirely sleepless babies were born. (Millions of bleary-eyed young parents might dispute that statement; but the usual baby does go to sleep, after all, just about the time its parents have to get up.)
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes: Stories
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The mezklete bustled up to them, pushing its little cart with its furry paws. Mezkletes love parties, love to give food, love to serve drinks and watch their humans get weird. It stayed about hopefully for a while to see if they would get weird, then bustled back to the Anarresti theorists, who were always weird.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories
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exudation on
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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 ones country; is it hate of ones uncountry?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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All of us that read a lot, were partly book-manufactured.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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 forso that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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Now came the great, improbable impetus to the book: a road trip to southeastern Oregon, our first visit to Harney County, a high and lonesome land of mountains and great sagebrush plains, of pure skies, far distances, and silence. Coming back from there, after a two-day, weary, dusty drive with our three kids, I knew my novel would be set in that desert. In the car, when we werent playing Signs Alphabet or singing Forty-Nine Bottles, I began to dream my story. That land had given it to me. I am forever grateful.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it's an easy name to call another man; a name that sticks, that fits, that convinces. I was half convinced myself.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Neither anger nor hope served any purpose. Nor grief. It was not the time for grief yet. Rekam was here with them, and they would delight in him as long as he was here. As long as his life. He is my great gift. You do hold my joy.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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A poem of the right shape will hold a thousand truths. But it doesnt say any of them.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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It was an ugly face, pale, coarse, and cruel, but Ged feared no man, though he might fear where such a man would guide him.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Wells imagined both dark and bright futures because his creed allowed both while promising neither, and because the eighty years of his life were years of immense intellectual and technological accomplishment and appalling violence and destruction.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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His speeches were long and loud: praises of Karhide, disparagements of Orgoreyn, vilifications of disloyal factions, discussions of the integrity of the Kingdoms borders, lectures in history and ethics and economics, all in a ranting, canting, emotional tone that went shrill with vituperation or adulation. He talked much about pride of country and love of the parentland, but little about shifgrethor, personal pride or prestige. Had Karhide lost so much prestige in the Sinoth Valley business that the subject could not be brought up? No; for he often talked about the Sinoth Valley. I decided that he was deliberately avoiding talk of shifgrethor because he wished to rouse emotions of a more elemental, uncontrollable kind. He wanted to stir up something that the whole shifgrethor-pattern was a refinement upon, a sublimation of. He wanted his hearers to be frightened and angry. His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate. He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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He had almost yielded, but not quite. He had not consented. It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Thwil Town
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience. Back
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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If you go ahead, if you keep running, wherever you run you will meet danger and evil, for it drives you, it chooses the way you go. You must choose. You must seek what seeks you. You must hunt the hunter.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Confucius and you are both dreams, and I who say you are dreams am a dream myself. This is a paradox. Tomorrow a wise man may explain it; that tomorrow will not be for ten thousand generations.  CHUANG TSE: II
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Theres a Hainish parable of the Mirror. If the glass is whole, it reflects the whole world, but broken, it shows only fragments, and cuts the hand that holds it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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When theres no social pressure behind it, respectful behavior becomes a decision, an individual choice.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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We called the boat Sanderling, but do you call her Lookfar, and paint eyes aside her prow, and my thanks will look out of that blind wood for you and keep you from rock and reef. For I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I must go where I am bound to go, and turn my back on the bright shores. I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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No-mind is an evil place for mind to stay.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales
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Una sociedad slo puede aliviar el sufrimiento social, el sufrimiento innecesario. El resto subsiste. La raz, la realidad. Todos nosotros, los que estamos aqu, vamos a conocer el dolor; si vivimos cincuenta aos, sern cincuenta aos de dolor. Y al final moriremos. Esa es la condicin en la que hemos nacido.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Are we so feeble we cant withstand a little exposure?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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La libertad se apoya ms sin duda en la franqueza que en la ocultacin, y la libertad siempre merece que se corra el riesgo.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Cowardice of this degree is, I know, uncommon. Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird feeder.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes: Stories
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Here you think the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there's no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. people like to do things. They like to do them well.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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This is part of what I meant about housework. If it isn't important, what is? If it isn't done honorably, where is honor? Ista
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices
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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 mens acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Weve outgrown the kind of barbarism that used to bring war into the heart of the high civilizations!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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She laughed again, and she looked at me. Just for a moment. But she looked, she saw. She wasn't looking at me to see what she looked like, she was looking me to see what I looked like. That is unusual in my experience
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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We all do harm by being.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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Dont WORry if OTHers disaGREE DONT WORry if OTHers DISagree Dont WORry if OTHers DISaGREE
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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La libertad se apoya ms, sin duda, en la franqueza que en la ocultacin, y la libertad siempre merece que se corra el riesgo
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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But is it only bigots, then, who are allowed to go out into the cosmos?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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No, I dont mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I never knew a person who reacted so wholly and rapidly to a changed situation as Estraven. I was recovering, and willing to go; he was out of thangen; the instant that was all clear, he was off. He was never rash or hurried, but he was always ready. 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I brought nothing, Shevek said. Though the suit had been bleached almost to white and bad shrunk a bit, it still fit, and the harsh familiar touch of holum-fiber cloth was pleasant. He felt like himself again. He sat down on the bed facing the doctor and said, You see, I know you don't take things, as we do. In your world, in Urras, one must buy things. I come to your world, I have no money, I cannot buy. therefore I should bring. But how much can I bring? Clothing, yes, I might bring two suits. But food? How can I bring food enough? I cannot bring, I cannot buy. If I am to be kept alive, you must give it to me. I am an Anarresti, I make the Urrasti behave like Anarresti: to give. not to sell If you like. Of course, it is not necessary to keep me alive! I am the Beggarman, you see.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Orrs gods were nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship nor obedience. Yet
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate. He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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We cant restructure our society without restructuring the English language. One reflects the other. A lot of people are getting tired of the huge pool of metaphors that have to do with war and conflict [and] the proliferation of battle metaphors, such as being a warrior, righting, defeating, and so on. In response, I could say that once you become conscious of these battle metaphors, you can start fighting against them. Thats one option. Another is to realize that conflict is not the only human response to a situation and to begin to find other metaphors, such as resisting, outwitting, skipping, or subverting. This kind of consciousness can open the door to all sorts of new behavior.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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paralyzing humiliation was a chemical sequel to getting drunk, like the headache.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew
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the longer he lived on Urras, the less real it became to him. It seemed
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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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, visionariesthe realists of a larger reality.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. 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, and very often in our art, the art of words.
 Ursula Le Guin
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. . . all delight being in the present and its past, all truth too, and all fidelity in the word, the flesh, the present moment: for the future, however you look at it, contains only one sure thing and that is death. But the moment is unpredictable.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales
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A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
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The way that can be gone is not the eternal Way.... His
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City Of Illusions
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To oppose something is to maintain it.

They say here "all roads to Mishnory". To be sure, if you turn back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitable to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
 Ursula K. Le Guin , The Left Hand of Darkness
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The writing of fiction is endlessly surprising to the writer.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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Stealthily the stars slid forward into nothingness.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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  ,    ,         ,   ,     .
,    ,   -      -        ,  ,             .       ,   .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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If you believe that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
 Ursula Le Guin
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stediin kadar bir ta sula, ta bymez.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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Then suddenly he was aware of a man clothed in white who watched him through the falling water of the fountain.
As their eyes met, a bird sang aloud in the branches of the tree. 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.
Then that moment passed, and he and the world were as before, or almost as before. He went forward to kneel before the Archmage, holding out to him the letter written by Ogion.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Good Lord, you're funny, too! Is there anything you arent? A salesman, he said.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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The story is the way the story is told. Adams
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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Dessutom tar jag hellre emot dliga nyheter frn en rlig man n lgner frn en smickrare (s. 72).
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
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No wizardry would serve him now, but only his own flesh, his life itself, against the unliving.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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It is useless work that darkens the heart.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time; plenty of time;
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We cant stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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How you play is what you win.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Do you people realize, by the way, that to my three children science fiction is not a low form of literature involving little winged men and written by little contemptible hacks. Its an absolutely ordinary respectable square profession. Its the kind of thing your own mother does?
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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He would not have fought for less than the truth, but it was the fighting he had loved, better than the truth.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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No, I dont mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year. Weve followed our road too far.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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To say that an Orgota government fell means, of course, only that one group of Commensals replaced another group of Commensals in the controlling offices of the Thirty-Three. Some shadows got shorter and some longer, as they say in Karhide.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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If you are fantasising, you may be daydreaming, or you might be using your imagination therapeutically as a means of discovering reasons Reason does not know, discovering yourself to yourself.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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If you can see a thing whole, he said, it seems that its always beautiful. Planets, lives. But close up, a worlds all dirt and rocks. And day to day, lifes a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distanceinterval. 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Ac ekmek bir yanl anlamadr
 Ursula Le Guin, Mlkszler
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We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the 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. It is a boxUrras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras. For
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Kids used to have a whole lot of spare time, middle-class kids anyhow. Outside of school and if they werent into a sport, most of their time was spare, and they figured out more or less successfully what to do with it. I had whole spare summers when I was a teenager. Three spare months. No stated occupation whatsoever. Much of after-school was spare time too. I read, I wrote, I hung out with Jean and Shirley and Joyce, I moseyed around having thoughts and feelings, oh lord, deep thoughts, deep feelings I hope some kids still have time like that. The ones I know seem to be on a treadmill of programming, rushing on without pause to the next event on their schedule, the soccer practice the playdate the whatever. I hope they find interstices and wriggle into them. Sometimes I notice that a teenager in the family group is present in body  smiling, polite, apparently attentive  but absent. I think, I hope she has found an interstice, made herself some spare time, wriggled into it, and is alone there, deep down there, thinking, feeling.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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For a writer, there is a genuine difference between fantasy and science fiction.... [...] In fantasy you get to make it all up, even the rules of how things work, and then follow your rules absolutely. In science fiction you get to make it up, but you have to follow most of the rules of science, or at least not ignore them.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin
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Huge heavy things come and stand on granite and the granite just stays there and doesnt react and doesnt give way and doesnt adapt and doesnt oblige and when the huge heavy things walk away the granite is there just the same as it was before, just exactly the same, admirably. To change granite you have to blow it up.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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What would we do with freedom if we had it, Kosta? What has the West done with it? Eaten it. Put it in its belly. A great wondrous belly, thats the West. With a wise head on top of it, a mans head, with a mans mind and eyesbut the rest all belly. He cant walk any more. He sits at table eating, eating, thinking up machines to bring him more food, more food. Throwing food to the black and yellow rats under the table so they wont gnaw down the walls around him. There he sits, and here we are, with nothing in our bellies but air, air and cancer, air and rage. We can still walk. So were yoked. Yoked to the foreign plow. When we smell food we bray and kick. Are we men, though, Kosta? I doubt it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin
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You cannot buy the revolution... you can only BE the revolution
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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They preserved autonomy of conscience even at the cost of becoming eccentric.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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A partir dessa aceitao da transitoriedade, desenvolveu a sua vasta teoria, segundo a qual o que  mais mutvel se revela ser o mais cheio de eternidade, e a nossa relao com o rio, e a relao do rio connosco e consigo prprio, acaba por ser, ao mesmo tempo, mais complexa e mais reconfortante
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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What can you do to evil but refuse it? Not pretend it isnt there, but look at it, and know it, and refuse it. Punishment, what is punishment? Getting even, schoolboy stuff. The Bible God, vengeance is mine! And then it flips over and goes too far the other way, forgive them for they know not what they do. Who does know? I dont. But I have tried to know. I dont forgive a person who doesnt try to know, doesnt want to know if he does evil or not. I think in their heart they know what they do, and do it because it is in their power to do it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin
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proud men and umbrageous men, casting black shadows.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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This has been going on for two or three millennia. That is an amazingly long time for anything to mean anything to anybody.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Speech is sharinga cooperative art. You're not sharing, merely egoizing.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Ahora saba, y era cruel saberlo, que su tarea nunca haba consistido en tratar de deshacer lo que haba hecho sino en terminar lo que haba empezado.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Neither grief nor pride had so much truth in them as did joy, the joy that trembled in the cold wind between sky and sea, bright and brief as fire.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Planet of Exile
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Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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We dont count relatives much; we are all relatives, you see.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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If you believe that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Because she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and ends was, to her too, false. For her as for him, there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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ou 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?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate. He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization.

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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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History is not a science, it's an art.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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You don't understand what time is,' he said. 'You say the past is gone. the future is not real, there is no change, no hope. You think Anarres is a future that cannot be reached, as your past cannot be changed. So there is nothing but the present, this Urras, the rich, real, stable present, the moment now. And you think that is something which can be possessed! You envy it a little. You think it's something you would like to have. But it is not real, you know. It is not stable, not solidnothing is. Things change, change. You cannot have anything. And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future. Not only the past but also the future, not only the future but also the past! Because they are real: only their reality makes the present real. You will not achieve or even understand Urras unless you accept the reality, the enduring reality, of Anarres.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Gerek yolculuk geri dntr...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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The lights were out, there, and it was illuminated only by starlight. The air was quite cold. A nightblooming flower from some unimaginable world had opened among the dark leaves, and was sending out its perfume with patient, unavailing sweetness to attract some unimaginable moth trillions of miles away, in a garden on a world circling another star. The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included. The ones who cant do magic. The ones who dont have shining staffs or swords. Women, kids, the poor, the old, the powerless. Unheroes, ordinary peoplemy people. I didnt want to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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I dont know which I should fear more . . . death or life. I wish I could be done with fear.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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At least he sought this danger of his own will; and the nearer he came to it the more sure he was that, for this time at least, for this hour perhaps before his death, he was free.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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The strength of Shevek's personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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We can't restructure our society without restructuring the English language.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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. Thus as I sipped my smoking sour beer I thought that at table Estravens performance had been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit. Was it in fact perhaps this soft supple femininity that I disliked and distrusted in him? For it was impossible to think of him as a woman, that dark, ironic, powerful presence near me in the firelit darkness, and yet whenever I thought of him as a man I felt a sense of falseness, of imposture: in him, or in my own attitude towards him? His voice was soft and rather resonant but not deep, scarcely a mans voice, but scarcely a womans voice either ... but what was it saying?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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My lord, do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way. There
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Arren vide sempre meglio i draghi che si libravano nella brezza mattutina, e il suo cuore trasal di gioia nell'assistere a quel volo.
Vi era racchiusa tutta la gloria della mortalit.
La bellezza dei draghi era fatta di una forza terribile, della pi totale ferocia e nel contempo della grazia della ragione.
Perch si trattava di creature pensanti, dotate della capacit di parlare e di un'antica saggezza: nella leggiadria del loro volo c'era una fiera armonia.
Arren non parl ma pens: "Non mi interessa cosa succeder d'ora in poi. Ho visto i draghi volare nel vento del mattino.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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As we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.
  -- Ursula K Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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The artist who goes into himself most deeply -- and it is a painful journey -- is the artist who touches us most closely, speaks to us most clearly.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Shevek, meeting her eyes, knew that he had committed an unforgivable fault in forgetting her and, . . .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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When at last I learned forgetting, I learned it very quickly and all too well.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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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 ones country; is it hate of ones uncountry? Then its not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? Thats a good thing, but one mustnt 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Love doesnt just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each others arms, holding love, asleep.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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When you have nothing to pray for, thats when Luck hears you. If
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War, by not taking sides. The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. Its just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greekmaybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isnt Satan vs. Angels. It isnt Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isnt hobbits vs. orcs. Its just people vs. people. Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but its no use, I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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A meaningless question has only meaningless answers.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Hi kimse cezay kazanmaz, dl de. Aklnz hak etmek, kazanmak gibi fikirlerden arndrn, ancak o zaman dnebileceksiniz.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Solitude was his fate; he was trapped in his heredity.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Let no one else use you, Mr. Ai, the king was saying. Keep clear of factions. Tell your own lies, do your own deeds. And trust no one.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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 arent the scars. You arent ugly. You arent evil. You are Therru, and beautiful. You are Therru who can work, and walk, and run, and dance, beautifully, in a red dress.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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Btn kk eyler anlamlyd, yalnzca btn anlamszd.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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[T]he thought was meaningless, an attempt to quantify direct experience.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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The unknown, said Faxes soft voice in the forest, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion  Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable  the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine? That we shall die. Yes. Theres really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer  The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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To deny the past is to deny the future.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Most bigots are sincere.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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What happens to a man who just won't cooperate?"
"Well, he moves on. The others get tired of him, you know. They make fun of him, or they get rough with him, beat him up . . .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Consider: Anyone can turn his hand to anything. This sounds very simple, but its psychological effects are incalculable. 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. Consider: A child has no psycho-sexual relationship to his mother and father. There is no myth of Oedipus on Winter. Consider: There is no unconsenting sex, no rape. As with most mammals other than man, coitus can be performed only by mutual invitation and consent; otherwise it is not possible. Seduction certainly is possible, but it must have to be awfully well timed. Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter. The following must go into my finished Directives: when you meet a Gethenian you cannot and must not do what a bisexual naturally does, which is to cast him in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards him a corresponding role dependent on your expectations of the patterned or possible interactions between persons of the same or the opposite sex. Our entire pattern of sociosexual 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? Yet you cannot think of a Gethenian as it. They are not neuters. They are potentials, or integrals. Lacking the Karhidish human pronoun used for persons in somer, I must say he, for the same reasons as we used the masculine pronoun in referring to a transcendent god: it is less defined, less specific, than the neuter or the feminine. But the very use of the pronoun in my thoughts leads me continually to forget that the Karhider I am with is not a man, but a manwoman. The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience. Back
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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They move their heads around and flatten out their mouth and nose on the other persons mouth and nose and open their mouths in different ways, and you are supposed to feel sort of hot or wet or something as you watch.
 Ursula K. Le Guin`
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He is pretty, but his only unusual beauty is his eyes, and you have to look closely to realize it. Right around the large dark pupil they are green, and around that reddish yellow. I had seen that magical change in a semiprecious stone: he has eyes of chrysoberyl. Wikipedia tells us that chrysoberyl or alexandrite is a trichroic gem. It shows emerald green, red, or orange-yellow depending on the angle of the light.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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In the night one of them cried out aloud, dreaming. The other one reached his arm out sleepily, muttering reassurance, and the blind warm weight of his touch outweighed all fear.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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I dont know if its right to count people like you count numbers.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Hold fast to the one noble thing.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness
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I was afraid I'd fail. So I didn't work.'
And there it was, plain as a glass of water, the truth, which he had never admitted to himself.

 Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales
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If I turned left, east, I could look up a little, and I could see how the rain came, not only in waves as I often see it from the windows of the house, but spaced and crowded together to form columns, like tall white women, immense wraiths hurrying one after another endlessly northward up the beach, as fast as the wind and yet solemn, processional, great grave beings hurrying by.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives...But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalizable region, the authors mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insanebonkers. We believe in the existence of people who arent there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The sexual cycle averages 26 to 28 days (they tend to speak of it as 26 days, approximating it to the lunar cycle). For 21 or 22 days the individual is somer, sexually inactive, latent. On about the 18th day hormonal changes are initiated by the pituitary control and on the 22nd or 23rd day the individual enters kemmer, estrus. In this first phase of kemmer (Karh, secher) he remains completely androgynous. Gender, and potency, are not attained in isolation. A Gethenian in first-phase kemmer, if kept alone or with others not in kemmer, remains incapable of coitus. Yet the sexual impulse is tremendously strong in this phase, controlling the entire personality, subjecting all other drives to its imperative. When the individual finds a partner in kemmer, hormonal secretion is further stimulated (most importantly by touchsecretion? scent?) until in one partner either a male or female hormonal dominance is established. The genitals engorge or shrink accordingly, foreplay intensifies, and the partner, triggered by the change, takes on the other sexual role (? without exception? If there are exceptions, resulting in kemmer-partners of the same sex, they are so rare as to be ignored). This second phase of kemmer (Karh. thorharmen), the mutual process of establishing sexuality and potency, apparently occurs within a timespan of two to twenty hours. If one of the partners is already in full kemmer, the phase for the newer partner is liable to be quite short; if the two are entering kemmer together, it is likely to take longer. Normal individuals have no predisposition to either sexual role in kemmer; they do not know whether they will be the male or the female, and have no choice in the matter. (Otie Nim wrote that in the Orgoreyn region the use of hormone derivatives to establish a preferred sexuality is quite common; I havent seen this done in rural Karhide.) Once the sex is determined it cannot change during the kemmer-period. The culminant phase of kemmer (Karh. thokemmer) lasts from two to five days, during which sexual drive and capacity are at maximum. It ends fairly abruptly, and if conception has not taken place, the individual returns to the somer phase within a few hours (note: Otie Nim thinks this fourth phase is the equivalent of the menstrual cycle) and the cycle begins anew. If the individual was in the female role and was impregnated, hormonal activity of course continues, and for the 8.4-month gestation period and the 6- to 8-month lactation period this individual remains female. The male sexual organs remain retracted (as they are in somer), the breasts enlarge somewhat, and the pelvic girdle widens. With the cessation of lactation the female reenters somer and becomes once more a perfect androgyne. No physiological habit is established, and the mother of several children may be the father of several more. Social
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still dont know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. Its occupied by living.

An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome. But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I cant spare it. What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Did you ever happen to think, Dr. Haber,' he said, quietly enough but stuttering a little, 'that there, there might be other people who dream the way I do? That reality's being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the timeonly we don't know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know his dream. If that's true, I guess we're lucky not knowing it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Through him speaks a shrewd and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom a profound, old, terrible, and unimaginably various experience of life. But he himself is young: impatient, inexperienced. He stands higher than we stand, seeing wider, but he is himself only the height of a man.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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How did you get all this? Stole it, said the one-time prime minister of Karhide,
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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As far as the eye can see the infertile desert lies in the pitiless glare of the merciless sun, a lifeless, trackless, feckless, fuckless waste strown with the bones of luckless wayfarers. . .
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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It had not rained, here on these north-facing slopes. Snow-fields stretched down from the pass into the valleys of moraine. We stowed the wheels, uncapped the sledge-runners, put on our skis, and took offdown, north, onward, into that silent vastness of fire and 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I tend to avoid fiction about dysfunctional urban middle-class people written in the present tense. This makes it hard to find a new novel, sometimes.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Kemmer is not always played by pairs. Pairing seems to be the commonest custom, but in the kemmerhouses of towns and cities, groups may form and intercourse take place promiscuously among the males and females of the group. The furthest extreme from this practice is the custom of vowing kemmering (Karh. oskyommer), which is to all intents and purposes monogamous marriage. It has no legal status, but socially and ethically is an ancient and vigorous institution. The whole structure of the Karhidish Clan-Hearths and Domains is indubitably based upon the institution of monogamous marriage. I am not sure of divorce rules in general; here in Osnoriner there is divorce, but no remarriage after either divorce or the partners death: one can only vow kemmering once. Descent of course is reckoned, all over Gethen, from the mother, the parent in the flesh (Karh. amha). Incest is permitted, with various restrictions, between siblings, even the full siblings of a vowed-kemmering pair. Siblings are not however allowed to vow kemmering, nor keep kemmering after the birth of a child to one of the pair. Incest between generations is strictly forbidden (In Karhide/Orgoreyn; but is said to be permitted among the tribesmen of Perunter, the Antarctic Continent. This may be slander.). What else have I learned for certain? That seems to sum it up. There is one feature of this anomalous arrangement that might have adaptive value. Since coitus takes place only during the period of fertility, the chance of conception is high, as with all mammals that have an estrous cycle. In harsh conditions where infant mortality is great, a race survival value may be indicated. At present neither infant mortality nor the birthrate runs high in the civilized areas of Gethen. Tinibossol estimates a population of not over 100 million on the Three Continents, and considers it to have been stable for at least a millennium. Ritual and ethical absention and the use of contraceptive drugs seem to have played the major part in maintaining this stability. There are aspects of ambisexuality that we have only glimpsed or guessed at, and which we may never grasp entirely. The kemmer phenomenon fascinates all of us Investigators, of course. It fascinates us, but it rules the Gethenians, dominates them. The structure of their societies, the management of their industry, agriculture, commerce, the size of their settlements, the subjects of their stories, everything is shaped to fit the somer-kemmer cycle. Everybody has his holiday once a month; no one, whatever his position, is obliged or forced to work when in kemmer. No one is barred from the kemmerhouse, however poor or strange. Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion. This is easy for us to understand. What is very hard for us to understand is that, four-fifths of the time, these people are not sexually motivated at all. Room is made for sex, plenty of room; but a room, as it were, apart. The society of Gethen, in its daily functioning and in its continuity, is without sex. Consider:
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Here, the government can check not only act but thought. Surely no men should have such power over others.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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He lay down in the field and slept under the stars, with the otak nestling in his pocket. After the sun was up he went, still fasting, to the door of the House and knocked. The Doorkeeper opened. Master, said Ged, I cannot take your name from you, not being strong enough, and I cannot trick your name from you, not being wise enough. So I am content to stay here, and learn or serve, whatever you will: unless by chance you will answer a question I have. Ask it. What is your name?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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dont know if our life has a purpose and I dont see that it matters. What does matter is that were 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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THE DOMESTICATION OF HUNCH
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Even from the brother there is no comfort in the bad hour, in the dark at the foot of the wall.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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The Akan system is a spiritual discipline with spiritual goals, but they're exactly the same goals it seeks for bodily and ethical well-being.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Bedap, who had been putting on weight at the waist and was serious about exercise, was trotting earnestly around the playing field. The others were sitting on a dusty bank under trees, getting their exercise verbally.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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He was so intense, so serious, armored in the formality of his rank and yet vulnerable in his honesty, the purity of his will. Her heart yearned to him. He thought he had learned pain, but he would learn it again and again, all his life, and forget none of it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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it doesnt take a thousand men to open a door,
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Dont shove me into your pigeonhole, where I dont fit, because Im all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elitesometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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No need to try to find it," said Unroy. "The sacredness is there. In the
truth, the pain, the beauty. So that the telling of it is sacred.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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I remember Aeneas words as I remember the poets words. I remember every word because they are the fabric of my life, the warp I am woven on. All my life since Aeneas death might seem a weaving torn out of the loom unfinished, a shapeless tangle of threads making nothing, but it is not so; for my mind returns as the shuttle returns always to the starting place, finding the pattern, going on with it. I was a spinner, not a weaver, but I have learned to weave.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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In the big, crowded, noisy room where golden suns swam on the walls and the years and Years were told on golden dials, he searched for the alien, the stranger, his wife.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Planet of Exile
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She found that their company revived her, carried her away from the constant presence of last night's terror, little by little, till she could begin to look back on it as something that had happened, not something that was happening, that must always be happening to her.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
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Ve sonra, eer bana ihtiyacn olursa, beni ar. Gelirim. Beni arrsan, mezarmdan bile kar gelirim Tenar ! Ama seninle kalamam.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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To oppose something is to maintain it.

They say here "all roads lead to Mishnory." To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

Yegey in the Hall of the Thirty-Three today: 'I unalterably oppose this blockade of grain-exports to Karhide, and the spirit of competition which motivates it.' Right enough, but he will not get off the Mishnory road going that way. He must offer an alternative. Orgoreyn and Karhide both must stop following the road they're on, in either direction; they must go somewhere else, and break the circle.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? 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 ones country; is it hate of ones uncountry? Then its not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? Thats a good thing, but one mustnt 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. Ignorant, in the Handdara sense: to ignore the abstraction, to hold fast to the thing. There was in this attitude something feminine, a refusal of the abstract, the ideal, a submissiveness to the given, which rather displeased me. Yet he added, scrupulous, A man who doesnt detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? 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 ones country; is it hate of ones uncountry? Then its not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? Thats a good thing, but one mustnt 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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If you go ahead, if you keep running, wherever you run you will meet danger and evil, for it drives you, it chooses the way you go. You must choose. You must seek what seeks you. You must hunt the
hunter...A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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The guesswork of a wizard is close to knowledge, though he may not know what it is he knows.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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No need to try to find it," said Unroy. "The sacredness is there. In the truth, the pain, the beauty. So that the telling of it is sacred.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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Shes pious. By that word I meant responsible, faithful to duty, open to awe.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when were done with it, we may findif its a good novelthat were a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But its very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I am without a face among men. I am not seen. I speak and am not heard. I come and am not welcomed. There is no place by the fire for me, nor food on the table for me, nor a bed made for me to lie in. Yet I still have my name.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Did you ever happen to think, Dr. Haber," he said, quietly enough but stuttering a little, "that there, there might be other people who dream the way I do? That reality's being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the timeonly we don't know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know his dream. If that's true, I guess we're lucky not knowing it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Be courageous and try to write in a way that scares you a little.  -- Ursula K Le Guin
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness is 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Old age isnt a state of mind. Its an existential situation. Would you say to a person paralyzed from the waist down, Oh, you arent a cripple! You're only as paralyzed as you think you are! My cousin broke her back once but she got right over it and now shes in training for the marathon!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Things dont have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. Whats the function of a galaxy? I dont know if our life has a purpose and I dont see that it matters. What does matter is that were 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. There
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The unknown, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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In fact, while we read a novel, we are insanebonkers. We believe in the existence of people who arent there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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said, without sincerity, but with absolute truth, It is a marvelous thing indeed for them as well, the coming to a new world, a new mankind.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Bir hrsz yaratmak iin, bir sahip yaratn; su yaratmak istiyorsanz, yasalar koyun.' ToplumsalOrganizma.
 Ursula Le Guin, Mlkszler
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Vad hon hade brjat lra sig var hur tungt det kan knnas att bli fri. Friheten r en mktig brda som ens sjl mste bra p. Det r inte s ltt. Det r ingen gva man fr, det r ett val man gr, och det kan vara ett svrt val. Vgen gr uppt mot ljuset men den tungt lastade resenren kanske aldrig nr fram till vgens slut.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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To nie bro ani kobieta stwarza mczyzn, nawet nie magia czy moc. Jedynie on sam moe tego dokona.
 Ursula K. LeGuin
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He wandered among the tanks for a long time, and often came back with her to the laboratory and the aquaria, submitting his physicists arrogance to those small strange lives, to the existence of beings to whom the present is eternal, beings that do not explain themselves and need not ever justify their ways to man.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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stepped out of the tent on to 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 he 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. A whitish-grey void, in which we appeared to hang. The illusion was so complete that I had trouble keeping my balance. My inner ears were used to confirmation from my eyes as to how I stood; they got none; I might as well be blind. It was all right while we loaded up, but hauling, with nothing ahead, nothing to look at, nothing for the eye to touch, as it were, it was at first disagreeable and then exhausting.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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We shape each other to be human.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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He will die of it. That he will: what does a man die of but his death?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The unexpected is what makes life possible.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I am offered the Grand Inquisitor's choice. Will you choose freedom without happiness, or happiness without freedom? The only answer one can make, I think, is: No.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
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I guess whats happened is that what used to be a shockword has become a noise thats supposed to intensify the emotion in what you're saying.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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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. One
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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My dogs have barked at a beggar tonight and he proves a prince of starlight.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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Independence was as far as his mind could reach. Yet I think his mind groped further, towards what he could not see, the body's obscure, inalterable dream of mutuality.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Do you realise, the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, that they couldnt even read Eggplant? And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pikes Peak.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Compass Rose
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-No, no hablo del amor, cuando me refiero al patriotismo. Hablo del miedo. El miedo del otro. Y las expresiones de ese miedo son polticas, no poticas: odio, rivalidad, agresin. Crece en nosotros, ese miedo crece en nosotros ao a ao.
  -- Ursula K Le Guin
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Its queer that daylights not enough. We need the shadows, in order to walk.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Why, why is a girl brought up at home to be a woman in exile the rest of her life?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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El tiempo no transcurra. No haba tiempo. l era el tiempo: slo l. Era el ro, la flecha, la piedra. Pero no avanzaba.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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are all contingent.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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Al final de los tiempos el sol se devorar a s mismo y la sombra devorar la luz, y entonces no quedar nada sino hielo y oscuridad.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people. Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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Lo que estaba empezando a descubrir era el peso de la libertad. La libertad es una carga pesada, extraa y abrumadora para el espritu que ha de llevarla. No es cmoda. No es un regalo que se recibe, sino una eleccin que se hace, y la eleccin puede ser difcil. El camino asciende hacia la luz; pero el viajero que soporta la carga acaso no llegue jams a la meta.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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We came, Takver thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance thats already between us, the distance of our sex, the difference of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, he comes back. Takver
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Art isnt explanation. Art is what an artist does, not what an artist explains.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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It wasn't Juju this time, it might be that bigdome Gosse, or any of them; no difference; they all bleated baa.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Negare il passato significa negare il futuro. Un uomo non costruisce il proprio destino. Lo accetta o lo contrasta.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, La saga di Terramare
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What is sacredness?
What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful.
So the Telling tries to find the truth in events or the pain, or the beauty?
No need to try to find it, said Unroy. The sacredness is there. In the truth, the pain, the beauty. So that the telling of it is sacred.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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new worlds were born of their talking.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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so long as Ive tried to understand what the author tried to do, and have no illusions of my critical infallibility, condoning inferiority isnt an option open to me.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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I thought I was inventing my own lot of imaginary aliens , and I was only describing the Senoi. It is not only th Captain Davidsons who can be found in the unconscious, if one looks. The quiet people who do not kill each other are there, too. It seems that a great deal is there, the things we most fear (and therefore deny), the things we most need (and therefore deny). I wonder, couldn't we start listening to our dreams, and our children dreams? "Where did you fall to, and what did you discover?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
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In bed, they made love. Love doesnt just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each others arms, holding love, asleep.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Sleep gets some really good PR from poets, who are used to talking clearly about things we dont understand.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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Irresponsible as a tourist, I wandered around in my universe forgetting what I'd said about it the last time, and then trying to conceal discrepancies with implausibilities, or with silence. If, as some think, God is no longer speaking, maybe it is because he looked at what he'd made and found himself unable to believe it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 1: Rocannons World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions / The Left Hand of Darkness / The Dispossessed / Stories
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My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitablebut not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert. We survive there, as you do. People are tough! There are nearly a half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never dothey never adapt either.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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Justice is in the hands of the gods, an old poet wrote, mortal hands hold only mercy and the sword.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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The path never reached it, though it always seemed to be about to.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Housekeeping, the art of the infinite, is no game for amateurs.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Sur
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adumbration of
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Complete Orsinia: Malafrena / Stories and Songs
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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. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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Where man goes, trees die; or, to paraphrase Tacitus, we make a desert and call it progress.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Ronde, one a live village and the other deserted, as dead as Karnak,
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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What did they want her back for? Her husbands honor demanded it. I should think his honor demanded that he divorce her and find himself a decent wife.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it. Now,
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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An owl is mostly air.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Out Here: Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country
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I talk about gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The only emotion I felt was shame. For him, for myself. Again I had trusted, and again I had betrayed and been betrayed. Venne
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
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IT dehumanizes; THEY has too many confusing possible referents; no invented genderless pronoun has yet proved satisfactory. Our understanding of gender is still growing and changing. I hope and trust our wonderfully adaptable language will provide the usages we need.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 1: Rocannons World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions / The Left Hand of Darkness / The Dispossessed / Stories
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every world of it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Human societies provide us with various more elaborate devices. One of the most effective is respect. You dont like the stranger, but your carefully respectful behavior to him elicits the same from him, thus avoiding the sterile expense of time and blood on aggression and defense.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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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. Nor
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I walk on the ground and the grounds walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world. Only
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Because our men and women are freepossessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyesthe wall, the wall!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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my books won't take me far
into this place
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Out Here: Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country
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And Tenar listened to the sea, a few yards below the cave mouth, crashing and sucking and booming on the rocks, and the thunder of it down the beach eastward for miles. Over and over and over it made the same sounds, yet never quite the same. It never rested. On all the shores of all the lands in all the world, it heaved itself in these unresting waves, and never ceased, and never was still. The desert, the mountains: they stood still. They did not cry out forever in a great, dull voice. The sea spoke forever, but its language was foreign to her. She did not understand.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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Listen, Tenar. Heed me. You were the vessel of evil. The evil is poured out. It is done. It is buried in its own tomb. You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light, as a lamp burning holds and gives its light. I found the lamp unlit; I wont leave it on some desert island like a thing found and cast away. Ill take you to Havnor and say to the princes of Earthsea, Look! In the place of darkness I found the light, her spirit. By her an old evil was brought to nothing. By her I was brought out of the grave. By her the broken was made whole, and where there was hatred there will be peace.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales
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To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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When we pass a log truck on the roads of Oregon, I can't help but see what they carry as corpses, bodies that were living and are dead. I think of how we owe the air we breathe to the trees, the ferns, the grasses - the quiet people who eat sunlight.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 1: Rocannons World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions / The Left Hand of Darkness / The Dispossessed / Stories
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A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally, and carefully--as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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The curve of his bald forehead shone in the sunlight, open and noble as a high hill standing bare above a crowded subdivision. His face was suburban, crowded with features, chin and long lips and nostrils and fleshy nose and the small, clear, anxious blue eyes. Only the forehead that looked like a big California hill had room.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin
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Wasnt it immoral to do work you didnt enjoy?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices
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She had not realized how very different people were, how differently they saw life. She felt as if she had looked up and suddenly seen a whole new planet hanging huge and populous right outside the window.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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I found an entry for the Beidr, of the Unon Plane, an aggressive and enterprising people with highly advanced material technologies, who have been in trouble more than once with the Interplanary Agency for interfering on other planes. The tourist guidebook gives them the symbols that mean of special interest to engineers, computer programmers, and systems analysts.)
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes: Stories
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Old Age Is Not for the Young.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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La vida es posible slo a causa de esa permanente e intolerable incertidumbre: no conocer lo que vendr.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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What matters most about a word is that is says what we need a word for.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 1: Rocannons World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions / The Left Hand of Darkness / The Dispossessed / Stories
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Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive. The
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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He thought, I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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The Veksi are an angry species. Their social life consists largely of arguments, recriminations, quarrels, fights, outbursts of fury, fits of the sulks, brawls, feuds, and impulsive acts of vengeance.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes: Stories
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No one else, no thing even, has an existence of its own for him; he sees the world only as a means to his end. It doesnt make any difference if his end is good; means are all weve got
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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It doesn't have to be the way it is. That is what fantasy says. It doesn't say "Anything goes" --- that's irresponsibility, when two and one make five, or forty-seven...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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And hearing it that way as a kid, I thought, Hunh? but didnt say anything, because there is no way, no possible way, a kid can ask about everything grownups say that the kid thinks Hunh? about.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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A related point: The job of the imagination, in making a story from experience, may be not to gussy the story up but to tone it down. The fact is, the world is unbelievably strange and human behavior is frequently so weird that no kind of narrative except farce or satire can handle it. The function of the storyteller's imagination sometimes is simply to make it more plausible.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The World Split Open
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It's when he gets so, you know, like he has to control everything or everything will be out of control, I get sort of out of control.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea
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So honest conversation about concerning geezerhood takes place mostly among geezers.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Peace above all, until the War comes...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Rocannon's World
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Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Dont look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then. I
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords. He makes fear serve him. I would have let fear lead me around by the long way. Courage and reason are with him. 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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You want to work spells,' Ogion said presently, striding along. 'You've drawn too much water from that well. Wait. Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience. What is that herb by the path?'
'Strawflower.'
'And that?'
'I don't know.'
'Fourfoil, they call it.' Ogion had halted, the coppershod foot of his staff near the little weed, so Ged looked closely at the plant, and plucked a dry seedpod from it, and finally asked, since Ogion said nothing more, 'What is its use, Master?'
'None I know of.'
Ged kept the seedpod a while as they went on, then tossed it away.
'When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?' Ogion went on a half mile or so, and said at last, 'To hear, one must be silent.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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But you're so strong. I wish I were strong. I just like eating.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Biz hayal gc zengin insanlar'Evvel zaman iinde bir ejderha varm.' ya da 'Toprakta bir delikte bir hobbit yaarm.' gibi cmlelerle, byle gerek d eylerle kendi tuhaf tarzmz sayesinde hakikate ulaabiliriz.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Hearth-brothers, or friends, he said, and saying it was remote, out of reach, two feet from me in a tent eight feet across. No answer to that. What is more arrogant than honesty? Cooled, I climbed into my fur bag. Good night, Ai, said the alien, and the other alien said, Good night, Harth. 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 hands touch, changelings in the human cradle, they were no flesh of mine, no friends; no love between us.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didnt work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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- Vrijeme se kree i u krugovima, ba kao i pravocrtno. Planeti rotiraju, shvaate? Jedan krug, jedan ophod oko Sunca je godina dana, zar ne? Kada napravi dva kruga, onda su to dvije godine i tako dalje, moglo bi se tako brojiti u nedogled... neki promatra bi to mogao. Zapravo je to sistem po kojem raunamo vrijeme, to je ono to nam stvara sat, onu uru s koje ga oitavamo. Ali unutar tog sustava, tog kruga, gdje je vrijeme? Gdje je poetak ili kraj? Beskonano ponavljanje je atemporalni proces. Da bi ga se vidjelo kao temporalni, mora se usporeivati, mora se odnositi na neki drugi cikliki ili necikliki proces. E pa znate, to je jako udno i jako zanimljivo. Vi znate i da atomi rotiraju. Stabilni spojevi su sastavljeni od lanova koji imaju stabilno periodino gibanje u odnosu na druge. Zapravo to siuno kruno kretanje atoma je ono to materiji daje dovoljnu postojanost da evolucija bude mogua. Te male bezvremenosti zbrojene zajedno tvore vrijeme. A onda, na velikoj skali, i kozmos: poznato vam je da smatramo kako je cijeli svemir cikliki proces, osciliranje ekspanzija i kontrakcija, bez ikakvog prije ili poslije. Samo unutar svakog od velikih krugova u kojima mi ivimo, samo tamo postoji linearno vrijeme, evolucija, promjene. Dakle, vrijeme ima dvije dimenzije. Postoji strijela, rijeka tekuica bez koje nema promjene ni napretka. I postoji krug ili ciklus, bez kojeg bi bio kaos, beznaajno nizanje trenutaka, svijet bez ure ili godinjih doba ili oekivanja.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Farfetching. What one is after when farfetching might be described as the intuitive perception of a moral entirety; and thus it tends to find expression not in rational symbols, but in metaphor.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales
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If you eat your...leafy greens and...develop your abs and blabs...in order to live a long life, that's good, and maybe it will work. But the longer a life is, the more of it will be in old age.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? 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 ones country; is it hate of ones uncountry? Then its not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? Thats a good thing, but one mustnt 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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...unfair as it may be, nothing guarantees health to the old. Bodies wear out...despite the most careful maintenance.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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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 mens eyes. And where men worship these things and abase themselves before them, there evil breeds;
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. Its just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Orr stooped to unlace his shoes. He didn't want to get the Alien's bedspread dirty with his shoes; that would be scarcely a fair return for kindness. Stooping made him dizzy. "I am tired", he said. "I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire willpower, the accumulated strengths of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button."

"You have lived well," the Alien said
  -- Ursula K Le Guin
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Los buenos terminan triunfando. O quiz los triunfadores terminan siendo los buenos?
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here all roads lead to Mishnory. To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I thought also of another thing between us. Call it trust... That is one of its names. It is a very great thing. Though each of us alone is weak, having that we are strong, stronger than the powers of the dark.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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foundations, laid in the dark but well laid. On these, methodically and carefully but with a deftness and certainty that seemed nothing of his own but a knowledge working through him, using him as its vehicle, he built up the beautiful steadfast structure of the Principles of Simultaneity. Takver,
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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sitting at the table for six or eight hours straight. When he got up he would lurch with fatigue, his hands shook, and he was scarcely coherent. The usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears them out, discards them, gets a new model.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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It exists, Shevek said, spreading out his hands. Its real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I cant pretend that it doesnt exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course its right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We cant prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, well have known pain for fifty years. And in the end well die. Thats the condition were born on. Im afraid of life! There are times II am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isnt all a misunderstandingthis grasping after happiness, this fear of pain.... If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could ... get through it, go beyond it There is something beyond it. Its the self that suffers, and theres a place where the selfceases. I dont know how to say it. But I believe that the realitythe truth that I recognize in suffering as I dont in comfort and happinessthat the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way. The reality
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Encender una vela es proyectar una sombra...
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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We came. . . from a great distance to each other. We have always done so, over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing. No distances, no years can be greater than the distance that's already between us, the distance of our sex, the difference of our being, our minds, that gap, that abyss, which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is. He always is, but he comes back. He comes back. He comes back.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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Can you imagine any president, now, asking the American people...to refrain from meat now and then to provide more grain to programs and food banks for the 20,000,000 Americans living in "extreme poverty"...right now? Or, actually, asking us to do without anything for any reason? Something has changed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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You were the vessel of evil. The evil is poured out. It is done. It is buried in its own tomb. You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light, as a lamp burning holds and gives its light. I found the lamp unlit; I won't leave it on some desert island like a thing found and cast away. I'll take you to Havnor and say to the princes of Earthsea, 'Look! In the place of darkness I found the light, her spirit. By her an old evil was brought to nothing. By her I was brought out of the grave. By her the broken was made whole, and where there was hatred there will be peace.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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Life loves to know itself, out to its furthest limits; to embrace complexity is its delight. Our difference is our beauty.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters
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I have watched my country accept, mostly quite complacently, along with a lower living standard for more and more people, a lower moral standard. A moral standard based on advertising.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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In fact it was, the endless warm drizzle of spring - the ice of Antarctica, falling softly on the heads of the children of those responsible to melting it
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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ILL MAKE MY REPORT AS IF I TOLD A STORY, FOR I WAS taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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She took his arm. He stopped short, as if her touch had electrocuted him on the spot.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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The margin between collusion and respect can be narrow, Tong said.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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The idea that only belief sees the world as wonderful, and the "cold hard facts" of science take all the color and wonder out of it, the idea that scientific understanding automatically threatens and weakens religious or spiritual insight, is just hokum.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here all roads lead to Mishnory. To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The only fantasy in this novel could be seen as its unexpectedly hopeful ending. Saramago had a very high regard for truth; I think he chose to stop the story on a high point, not because he believed the ideals of social justice would ever be fulfilledIm not sure he believed in anything, in that sensebut because he judged a rational hope more useful than despair, and because he sought beauty in his art.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin? From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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He said, Please tell me, Sutty, is the institutionalised homophobia very difficult for you? I grew up with it. Under the Unists. Not only the Unists.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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He thought he had learned pain, but he would learn it again and again, all his life, and forget none of it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Solo en el silencio la palabra, solo en la oscuridad la luz, solo en la muerte la vida; el brillo del halcn brilla en el cielo vaco.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a mans real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower; until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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existed. He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Akllya soru gerekmez; aptal ise bouna sorar." -38
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Sz sessizlikte,
k karanlkta,
yaam lrken;
bombo gkyznde
uarken parlar atmaca.
-Ea'nn Yaradl
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Que nuestros enemigos mueran sin hijos dijo el angya gravemente, alzando la copa, que haba vuelto a llenar.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Mundos de exilio e ilusin
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Though bigots have small ears.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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Dnyada sadece tek bir ey kt yrekli bir insana kar durabilir. O da baka bir insandr. Aybmzda yatar erefimiz. Sadece bizim
ruhumuz, ktle ak olan ruhumuz, onu yenmeye muktedirdir.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story... ? Tell me what it Means. But thats not my job, honey. Thats your job.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Geraldine Brooks: People of the Book
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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Hate eats the hater, she quoted from a familiar text of the Telling.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
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If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion... But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Meaning in art isnt the same as meaning in science.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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I'm not sure. I'm exceedingly ignorant-"
The young man laughed and bowed. "I'm honored!" he said."I've lived here for three years, but haven't yet acquired enough ignorance to be worth mentioning.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Hogeldin, oul," dedi Ogion.
"Sana, ayrldm zamanki gibi geri geldim: Bir aptal olarak," dedi gen adam; sesi sertlemi, kalnlamt. -129
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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In silence the mage turned and started back toward the road. Arren followed him. He dared ask no question. Presently the mage stopped, there in the ruined orchard, and said, I took her name from her and gave her a new one. And thus in some sense a rebirth. There was no other help or hope for her.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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assumed that if you removed a human beings natural incentive to workhis initiative, his spontaneous creative energyand replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Loss of face for the Commensals, caught lying. You will be a treasure, a long-lost hearth-brother, to King Argaven, Genry. For a while. You must send for your Star Ship at once, at the first chance you get.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea
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And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for lifes sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawks flight on the empty sky.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Its a good place for a child, the woods. You dont learn much about people, but you learn silence. Patience. And that theres nothing much to fear in the wildernessless than there is on a farm or in the city.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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...I, like Borges, think of heaven as something very like a library
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
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Enlades ve Gont gibi sihirbaz bol lkelerde, yamur bulutlarnn bir tlsmdan bir tlsma ilerleyerek, sonunda ykn huzur iinde denize boaltncaya kadar, yava yava bir yandan bir yana, bir yerden bir yere hareket ettiini grebilirsiniz.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Yerdeniz Bycs
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They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned. They were intelligent, their minds were already disciplined to the clarity of science, and they were sixteen years old. But at this point the pleasure of the argument ceased for Shevek, as it had earlier for Kvetur. He was disturbed.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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Age and illness made one a dualist
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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In a State, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerfulanother piston in the great machine?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
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It was not that Abbenay was short of power, not with her wind turbines and the earth temperature-differential generators used for heating; but the principle of organic economy was too essential to the functioning of the society not to affect ethics and aesthetics profoundly. Excess is excrement, Odo wrote in the Analogy. Excrement retained in the body is a poison.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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he saw what was up and
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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never had a gift but one, to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act. I had thought that foresight lost, last year in Erhenrang, and never to be regained. A great delight it was to feel that certainty again, to know that I could steer my fortune and the worlds chance like a bob-sled down the steep, dangerous hour.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Seen rightly, any situation, even a chaos or a trap would come clear and lead of itself to its one proper outcome: for there is in the long run no disharmony, only misunderstanding, no chance or mischance but only the ignorant eye.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, City of Illusions
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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 ones country; is it hate of ones uncountry? Then its not a good thing.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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You can't change anything from outside it. Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview, you see the 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness
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We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died. There is nothing left. Nothing but dreams.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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In trouble and from darkness you come, Ged, yet your coming is joy to me.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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I have this, this gift, I know that; and I know my obligation to it.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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white-skinned,
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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Syle bakalm,' dedi en sonunda, 'Roke'ten ayrlmaya korkuyor musun? Yoksa buradan ayrlmaya istekli misin?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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On the second night all creatures woke, and the sleepless cricket was silent suddenly. The thunder spoke from ridge to ridge, from canyon to canyon, far, then nearer. Darkness split wide open to reveal what it hides. Only for a moment can the eyes of the creatures see the world in that awful light.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Small Beer Press Easthampton, MA
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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Theyre strange here, Arren said. Its that way with everything; they dont know the difference. Like what one of them said to the headman last night, You wouldnt know the true azure from blue mud.... They complain about bad times, but they dont know when the bad times began; they say the works shoddy, but they dont improve it; they dont even know the difference between an artisan and a spell-worker, between handicraft and the Art Magic. Its as if they had no lines and distinctions and colors clear in their heads. Everythings the same to them; everythings grey.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Ged said at last, speaking low, "There is a thing that I fear, Estarriol. I fear it more
if you are with me when I go. There in the Hands in the dead end of the inlet I turned
upon the shadow, it was within my hands' reach, and I seized it - I tried to seize it. And
there was nothing I could hold. I could not defeat it. It fled, I followed. But that may
happen again, and yet again. I have no power over the thing. There may be neither death nor triumph to end this quest; nothing to sing of; no end. It may be I must spend my life running from sea to sea and land to land on an endless vain venture, a shadow-quest.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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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 ones country; is it hate of ones uncountry? Then its not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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He seemed not to know the uses of silence.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Ged said at last, speaking low, "There is a thing that I fear, Estarriol. I fear it more if you are with me when I go. There in the Hands in the dead end of the inlet I turned
upon the shadow, it was within my hands' reach, and I seized it - I tried to seize it. And there was nothing I could hold. I could not defeat it. It fled, I followed. But that may happen again, and yet again. I have no power over the thing. There may be neither death nor triumph to end this quest; nothing to sing of; no end. It may be I must spend my life running from sea to sea and land to land on an endless vain venture, a shadow-quest.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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One of our finest methods of organized forgetting is called discovery.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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lot. But she never could keep off the hard drugs, she was hooked. Shed be off for a year and then bingo. She got through the Plague, but when she was thirty-eight she got a dirty needle, and it killed her. And damn if her family didnt show up and take me over. Id never even seen them! And they put me through college and law school. And I go up there for Christmas Eve dinner every year. Im their token Negro. But Ill tell you, what really gets me is, I cant decide which color I am. I mean, my father was a black, a real blackoh, he had some white blood, but he was a blackand my mother was a white, and Im neither one. See, my father really hated my mother because she was white. But he also loved her. But I think she loved his being black much more than she loved him. Well, where does that leave me? I never have figured out. Brown, he said gently, standing behind her chair. Shit color. The color of the earth.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Fortune-telling and love-potions are not of much account, but old women are worth listening to.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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...though I want to see myself as a woman of strong feeling but peaceable instincts, I have to realize how often anger fuels my acts and thoughts, how very often I indulge in anger.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Some scientists hate religion, fear it, and rail against it. And some priests and preachers...claim the absolute primacy of biblical revelation over material fact.
Thus they both set a fatal trap for the believer: if you believe in God you can't believe in evolution, and vice versa.
But this is rather like saying if you believe in Tuesday you can't believe in artichokes.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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But I dont 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
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
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A View of Exmoor,
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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I hate the bigotry you believe in. But I'll try not to hate you."
"Why?" he asked. His voice was cold, as she remembered it.
"Hate eats the hater," she quoted from a familiar text of the Telling.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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A writer who wants to write good stuff needs to read great stuff.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
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To oppose something is to maintain it. They
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people arent beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You cant always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isnt enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are freepossessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyesthe wall, the wall!
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Home isnt Mom and Dad and Sis and Bud. Home isnt where they have to let you in. Its not a place at all. Home is imaginary.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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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!
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in. He
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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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 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 ones country; is it hate of ones uncountry? Then its not a good thing. It is simply self-love? Thats a good thing, but one mustnt 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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For 21 or 22 days the individual is somer, sexually inactive, latent. On about the 18th day hormonal changes are initiated by the pituitary control and on the 22nd or 23rd day the individual enters kemmer, estrus. In this first phase of kemmer (Karh, secher) he remains completely androgynous
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly,
that the truth is a matter of the imagination.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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The Master Hand looked at the jewel that glittered on Ged's palm, bright as the prize of a dragon's hoard. The old Master murmured one word, "Tolk," and there lay the pebble, no jewel but a rough grey bit of rock. The Master took it and held it out on his own hand. "This is a rock; tolk in the True Speech," he said, looking mildly up at Ged now. "A bit of the stone of which Roke Isle is made, a little bit of the dry land on which men live. It is itself. It is part of the world. By the Illusion-Change you can make it look like a diamond  or a flower or a fly or an eye or a flame  " The rock flickered from shape to shape as he named them, and returned to rock. "But that is mere seeming. Illusion fools the beholder's senses; it makes him see and hear and feel that the thing is changed. But it does not change the thing. To change this rock into a jewel, you must change its true name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of the world, is to change the world. It can be done. Indeed it can be done. It is the art of the Master Changer, and you will learn it, when you are ready to learn it. 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 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..."

He looked down at the pebble again. "A rock is a good thing, too, you know," he said, speaking less gravely. "If the Isles of Eartbsea were all made of diamond, we'd lead a hard life here. Enjoy illusions, lad, and let the rocks be rocks.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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She had never been herself with other people, had always felt a falsity in her relationships with them; she had never known who she was at all, except sometimes for a moment in meditation, when her I am became It is, and she breathed the stars.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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If there are frontiers between the civilized and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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Erkein istedii zgrlktr , kadnn istedii mlkiyyettir
 Ursula Le Guin, Mlkszler
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She couldnt be a hero in the hero-tale sense. Not even in a fantasy? No. Because to me, fantasy isnt wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
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Carol Emshwiller: Ledoyt First published in 1997, revised in 2002, and revised again for this book
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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Sanki ezelden beri bu sessiz varln yannda, kararmakta olan sessiz bir diyarda yryormu gibi geldi Ged'e. indeki gayret ve dikkat hisleri kreldi. Sanki uzun, ok uzun bir dte, hibir yere doru yryordu.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in. But
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
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Jos Saramago
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Hellen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wouldn't be taken, but chose my man and my fate.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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I have one lifetime, and I will not spend it for greed and profiteering and lies.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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If the rowan's roots are shallow, it bears no crown.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention, beneath words, there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer's job is to go down deep enough to feel that rhythm, find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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that silent vastness of fire and 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.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied.... None of this is spare time. I can't spare it. ... I have no time to spare.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on. Even
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
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To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness. Tormenbod
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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He was putting on his old clothes, and as he pulled the shirt over his head he saw the doctor stuff the blue and yellow "sleeping clothes" into the "trash" bin. Shevek puased, the collar still over his nose. He emerged fully, knelt, and opened the bin. It was empty.
"The clothes are burned?"
Oh, those are cheap pajamas, service issue- wear 'em and throw 'em away, it costs less than cleaning."
"It costs less," Shevek repeated meditatively. He sad the words the way a paleontontologist looks at a fossil, the fossil that date a whole stratum.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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He wandered among the tanks for a long time, and often came back with her to the laboratory and the aquaria, submitting his physicist's arrogance to those small strange lives, to the existence of beings to whom present is eternal, beings that do not explain themselves and need not ever justify their ways to man.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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It's not death that allows us to understand one another, but poetry.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
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My race is very old," Ketho said. "We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, in all its forms, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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which seemed best to us. And they enjoyed it so much they collected the stories into a Book of Fantasy,
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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To hear, one must be silent. The
 Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
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,,Cum poi s urti o ar sau s iubeti alta? Tibe vorbete despre asemenea lucruri, eu n-am abilitatea lui. Eu cunosc oameni, orae, ferme, dealuri, ruri i stnci. tiu cum, toamna, razele amurgului scald un lumini pe o colin. Dar ce rost are s nconjuri toate aceste lucruri cu o grani, s le dai un nume i s te opreti cu iubirea acolo unde numele nceteaz? Dac i iubeti ara nseamn s urti neara? Atunci nu-i bine. E o simpl iubire de sine? Asta-i bine, dar nu trebuie s faci din ea o virtute sau o profesiune... Aa cum iubesc viaa, iubesc i dealurile Domeniului Estre, ns genul acesta de iubire nu are o frontier a urii. Iar dincolo de aa ceva sunt ignorant, sper...

Ignorant, n sensul Handdara: a ignora abstractul, a fi strns legat de concret. Atitudinea respectiv avea n ea ceva feminin: refuzarea abstractului, a idealului, o supunere fa de realitate, care nu m ncnt. (Estraven, cap. 15, ,,Spre Ghea)
 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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Emshwillers like a wild mixture of Italo Calvino (intellectual games) and Grace Paley (perfect honesty) and Fay Weldon (outrageous wit) and Jorge Luis Borges (pure luminosity), but noher voice is perfectly her own. She isnt like anybody. Shes different.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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No hay origen ni trmino, pues todas las cosas estn en el centro del tiempo. As como una gota de lluvia que cae en la noche puede reflejar todas las estrellas, as tambin todas las estrellas reflejan la gota de lluvia. No hay oscuridad ni muerte, pues todas las cosas son, a luz del momento, y el fin y el comienzo son uno.
 Ursula K. Le Guin
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But the fact is that, starting with Platos Republic in Philosophy 1-A when I was seventeen, I read utopias as novels. Actually, I still read everything as novels, including history, memoir, and the newspaper.
 Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writers Week
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No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties.
  -- Paul Goodman
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Wrong' training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month Club selections, because they are ludicrous and dull. As a young man, then, he will effectually be excluded from all of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and most of publishing, because what moves him or what he creates is quite irrelevant to what is going on: it is too fine. His father has brought him up as a dodo.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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Humankind is innocent, loving, and creative, you dig? It's the bureaucracies that create the evil, that make Honor and Community impossible, and it's the kids who really take it in the groin.
  -- Paul Goodman
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It then becomes necessary to stop short and make a choice: Either/Or. Either one drifts with their absurd system of ideas, believing that this is the human community. Or one dissents totally from their system of ideas and stands as a lonely human being. (But luckily one notices that the others are in the same crisis and making the same choices.)
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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I have learned to have very modest goals for society and myself; things like clean air, green grass, children with bright eyes, not being pushed around, useful work that suits one's abilities, plain tasty food, and occasional satisfying nookie.
  -- Paul Goodman
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Few great men could pass personnel.
  -- Paul Goodman
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I often ask, "What do you want to work at? If you have the chance. When you get out of school, college, the service, etc."

Some answer right off and tell their definite plans and projects, highly approved by Papa. I'm pleased for them* but it's a bit boring, because they are such squares.

Quite a few will, with prompting, come out with astounding stereotyped, conceited fantasies, such as becoming a movie actor when they are "discovered" "like Marlon Brando, but in my own way."

Very rarely somebody will, maybe defiantly and defensively, maybe diffidently but proudly, make you know that he knows very well what he is going to do; it is something great; and he is indeed already doing it, which is the real test.

The usual answer, perhaps the normal answer, is "I don't know," meaning, "I'm looking; I haven't found the right thing; it's discouraging but not hopeless."

But the terrible answer is, "Nothing." The young man doesn't want to do anything.

I remember talking to half a dozen young fellows at Van Wagner's Beach outside of Hamilton, Ontario; and all of them had this one thing to say: "Nothing." They didn't believe that what to work at was the kind of thing one wanted. They rather expected that two or three of them would work for the electric company in town, but they couldn't care less, I turned away from the conversation abruptly because of the uncontrollable burning tears in my eyes and constriction in my chest. Not feeling sorry for them, but tears of frank dismay for the waste of our humanity (they were nice kids). And it is out of that incident that many years later I am writing this book.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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Positively, the delinquent behavior seems to speak clearly enough. It asks for what we cant give, but it is in this direction we must go. It asks for manly opportunities to work, make a little money, and have self-esteem; to have some space to bang around in, that is not always somebodys property; to have better schools to open for them horizons of interest; to have more and better sex without fear or shame; to share somehow in the symbolic goods (like the cars) that are made so much of; to have a community and a country to be loyal to; to claim attention and have a voice. These are not outlandish demands. Certainly they cannot be satisfied directly in our present system; they are baffling. That is why the problem is baffling, and the final recourse is to a curfew, to ordinances against carrying knives, to threatening the parents, to reformatories with newfangled names, and to 1,100 more police on the street.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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Be patient, do nothing, cease striving. We find this advice disheartening and therefore unfeasible because we forget it is our own inflexible activity that is structuring the reality. We think that if we do not hustle, nothing will happen and we will pine away. But the reality is probably in motion and after a while we might take part in that motion. But one can't know.
  -- Paul Goodman
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The classical anthropological question, What is man?"how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!"is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and go on to Culture.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had the sex, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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To learn theory by experimenting and doing.
To learn belonging by participating and self-rule.
Permissiveness in all animal behavior and interpersonal expression.
Emphasis on individual differences.
Unblocking and training feeling by plastic arts, eurythmics and dramatics.
Tolerance of races, classes, and cultures.
Group therapy as a means of solidarity, in the staff meeting and community meeting.
Taking youth seriously as an age in itself.
Community of youth and adults, minimizing 'authority.'
Educational use of the actual physical plant (buildings and farms) and the culture of the school community.
Emphasis in the curriculum on real problems and wider society, its geography and history, with actual participation in the neighboring community (village or city).
Trying for functional interrelation of activities.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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These groups [of disaffected youth] are not small, and they will grow larger. Certainly they are suffering. Demonstrably they are not getting enough out of our wealth and civilization. They are failing to assimilate much of the culture. As was predictable, most of the authorities and all of the public spokesmen explain it by saying there has been a failure of socialization. They say that the background conditions have interrupted socialization and must be improved. And, not enough effort has been made to guarantee belonging, there must be better bait or punishment.

But perhaps there has not been a failure to communicate. Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable.

In this book I shall therefore take the opposite tack and ask, 'Socialization to what? to what dominant society and available culture?' And if this question is asked, we must at once ask the other question, 'Is the harmonious organization to which the young are inadequately socialized, perhaps against human nature, or not worthy of human nature, and therefore there is difficulty in growing up?' If this is so, the disaffection of the young is profound and it will not be finally remediable by better techniques of socializing. Instead, there will have to be changes in our society and its culture, so as to meet the appetites and capacities of human nature, in order to grow up.
  -- Paul Goodman , Growing Up Absurd
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Low pay generally means harder work under worse conditions.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, This this; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.
  -- Paul Goodman
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My thought is that the average adjusted boy is, if anything, more humanly wasted than the disaffected. So let us go on to discuss his stupidity, his lack of patriotism, his sexual confusion, and his lack of faith.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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Now shame is the only direct attack on conceit, the defensive image of oneself. Conceit is the common denominator of the Organization man, the hipster, and the juvenile delinquent-this is why I have been lumping them together. The conceited image of the self is usually not quite conscious, but it is instantly woundable; and people protect it with a conformity to their peers (oneself is superior). But the conceited groups differ in their methods of confirming and enhancing conceit: the juvenile delinquent by surly and mischievous destructiveness of the insulting privileged outgroup; the hipster by making fools of them with token performances; the Organization Man by status and salary. To his inner idol, they sacrifice the ingenuous exhibition and self-expression that could make them great, effective, or loved in the world; but that can also be shamed if it is mistaken, out of place, or disproportionate.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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These young-marrying, contemporaries or juniors of the Beat Generation, have often expressed themselves as follows: "My highest aim in life is to achieve a normal healthy marriage and raise healthy [non-neurotic] children." On the face of it, this remark is preposterous. What was always taken as a usual and advantageous life-condition for work in the world and the service of God, is now regarded as an heroic goal to be striven for. Yet we see that it is a hard goal to achieve against the modern obstacles. Also it is a real goal, with objective problems that a man can work at personally, and take responsibility for, and make decisions aboutunlike the interpersonal relations of the corporation, or the routine of the factory job for which the worker couldn't care less.
But now, suppose the young man is achieving this goal: he has the wife, the small kids, the suburban home, and the labor-saving domestic devices. How is it that it is the same man who uniformly asserts that he is in a Rat Race? Either the goal does not justify itself, or indeed he is not really achieving it. Perhaps the truth is, if marriage and children are the goal, a man cannot really achieve it. It is not easy to conceive of a strong husband and father who does not justified in his work and independent in the world. Correspondingly, his wife feels justified in the small children, but does she have a man, do the children have a father, if he is running a Rat Race? Into what world do the small children grow up in such a home?
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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Finding a new ethics or esthetics, as Dr. Douglass asks, will not put us in a state of grace. Existence is not given meaning by importing it into a revelation from the outside. The meaning is there, in more closely contacting the actual situation, the only situation that there is, whatever it is. As our situation is, closely contacting it would surely result in plenty of trouble and perhaps in terrible social conflicts, terrible opportunities and duties, during which we might learn something and at the end of which we might know something, even a new ethics; for it is in such conflicts that new ethics are discovered. But it is just these conflicts that we do not observe happening. Everybody talks nice. At most there is some unruliness and dumb protest, and some withdrawal.

So urging the juveniles to go to church is not serious, for how will the church give them faith? What opportunity will it open?
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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I am describing again an interrupted revolution, the so-called Sexual Revolution. We see now the organized system of production and sales manages to profit by the confusion of the interruption, whereas a finished revolution would be a dead loss, since good sexual satisfaction costs nothing, it needs only health and affection.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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The issue is not whether people are "good enough" for a particular type of society; rather it is a matter of developing the kind of social institutions that are most conducive to expanding the potentialities we have for intelligence, grace, sociability and freedom.
  -- Paul Goodman
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But the self is precisely the integrator; it is the synthetic unity, as Kant said. It is the artist of life. It is only a small factor in the total organism/environment interaction, but it plays the crucial role of finding and making the meanings that we grow by.
  -- Paul Goodman, Gestalt Therapy: Excitement & Growth in the Human Personality
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The Sexual plight of these children [those adolescents experimenting sexually] is officially not mentioned. The revolutionary attack on hypocrisy by Ibsen, Freud, Ellis, Dreiser, did not succeed this far. Is it an eccentric opinion that an important part of the kids' restiveness in school from the onset of puberty has to do with puberty? The teachers talk about it among themselves, all right. (In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had sex, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.) But since the objective factor does not exist in our schools, the school itself begins to be irrelevant. The question here is not whether sexuality should be discouraged or encouraged. That is an important issue, but far more important is that it is hard to grow up when existing facts are treated as though they do not exist. For then there is no dialogue, it is impossible to be taken seriously, to be understood, to make a bridge between oneself and society.

In American society we have perfected a remarkable form of censorship: to allow every one his political right to say what he believes, but to swamp his little boat with literally thousands of millions of newspapers, mass-circulation magazines, best-selling books, broadcasts, and public pronouncements that disregard what he says and give the official way of looking at things.
  -- Paul Goodman
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Then at once human nature is again invoked to prove the necessity of change, for human nature has been thwarted or insulted by the dominant system. Man can no longer be defined as what suits the dominant system, when the dominant system apparently does not suit men. I
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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The Beat spokesman, surprisingly, seemed to be satisfied with the ethics that we have inherited.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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As our organized system perfects itself, there is less "open" environment. It is hard for a social animal to grow when there is not an open margin to grow in: some open space, some open economy, some open mores, some activity free from regulation...A society cannot have decided all possibilities beforehand and have structured them. If society becomes too tightly integrated and pre-empts all the available space, materials and methods... when time, clothes, opinions and goals become so regulated that people feel they cannot be "themselves" or create something new, they bolt and look for fringes and margins, loop-holes, holes in the wall, or they just run.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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People are forced by their better judgment to ask very basic questions: Is it possible, how is it possible, to have more meaning and honor in work? to put wealth to some real use? to have a high standard of living of whose quality we are not ashamed? to get social justice for those who have been shamefully left out? to have a use of leisure that is not a dismaying waste of a hundred million adults?
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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(Becoming cultured and being adjusted to the social group are taken almost as synonymous.) Either way, it follows that you can teach people anything; you can adapt them to anything if you use the right techniques of socializing or communicating. The essence of human nature is to be pretty indefinitely malleable. Man, as C. Wright Mills suggests, is what suits a particular type of society in a particular historical stage. This
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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One sees many pretty young Beat couples. (I think they are pretty; some people think they are hideous.) Since conceit and proving are not major factors, there is affection. Homosexuality and bisexuality are not regarded as a big deal.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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The Civil War won formal rights for Negroes, but failed to win social justice and factual democracy. The actual result has been segregation, and fear and ignorance for both whites and blacks.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity. Prudence and responsibility are not middle-class virtues but human virtues.
  -- Paul Goodman
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Education is a natural community function and occurs inevitably, since the young grow up on
the old, towards their activities, and into (or against) their institutions; and the old foster, teach,
train, exploit and abuse the young. Even neglect of the young, except physical neglect, has an
educational effect -- not the worst possible.
  -- Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education/The Community of Scholars
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Free action is to live in the present society as though it were a natural society.
  -- Paul Goodman
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Despite having minority traditions of their own, our present poor are absolute sheep and suckers for the popular culture which they cannot afford, the movies, sharp clothes, and up to Cadillacs. Indeed, it is likely that the popular culture is aimed somewhat at them, as the lowest common denominator. I do not mean that this is not a reasonable compensation, like the Englishmans liquor and the Irishmans betting on the horses. Everybody has got to have something, and so poor people show off and feel big by means of the standard of living. But in these circumstances it is immensely admirable that the Beat Generation has contrived a pattern of culture that, turning against the standard culture, costs very little and gives livelier satisfaction. It is a culture communally shared, in small groups. Much of it is handmade, not canned. Some of it is communally improvised.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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Doing the forbidden is a normal function of growth.
  -- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
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