Ursula K. Le Guin quotes - page 14

Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
The creative adult is the child who has survived. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Nobody who says, ‘I told you so' has ever been, or will ever be, a hero. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
The light is the left hand of darkness. View quote
Ursula K. 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. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
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. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning living, as we do, in the middle. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
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. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong -- not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck -- if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we'll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
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. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Can true function arise from basic dysfunction? View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
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. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Truth is a matter of the imagination. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
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. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
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)
To me the ''female principle'' is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
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. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Anyhow they're always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin