Ursula K. Le Guin
writer, screenwriter, translator, novelist, poet, author, literary critic, science fiction writer, women's rights activist, children's writer, journalist, prose writer, writer of feminist science fiction
Read on Wikipedia1929 – 2018
All Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
“Uninfluenced by others, he never knew he influenced them; he had no idea they liked him.”
“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”
“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.”
“Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.”
“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.”
“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.”
“To be whole is to be part;true voyage is return.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Excess is excrement.”
“No doors were locked, few shut. There were no disguises and no advertisements. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to the hand.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“Grow up. Grow up. Time to grow up. You’re here now. We’re working on physics here, not religion. Drop the mysticism and grow up.”
“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.”
“Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.”
“You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing!”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.”
“The news had stirred him strangely. He listened for bulletins on the radio, which he had seldom turned on after finding that its basic function was advertising things for sale.”
““The politics of reality,” Shevek repeated. He looked at Oiie and said, “That is a curious phrase for a physicist to use.”“You put your petty miserable ‘laws’ to protect wealth, your ‘forces’ of guns and bombs, in the same sentence with the law of entropy and the force of gravity? I had thought better of your mind, Demaere!””
““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.””
““But what’s the good of this sort of ‘understanding,’” Dearri said, “if it doesn’t result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn’t it?”“You ask questions like a true profiteer,” Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction.”
“Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.”
“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 skillful 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.”
“He felt that sense of being necessary which is the burden and reward of parenthood.”
““There’s 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.””
“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.”
“Existence is its own justification, need is right.”
“The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.”
“Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind, it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument.”
“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?"”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. 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?”
“Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.”
“Where my guides lead me in kindness in the dust behind us.”
“There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.”
“She had come to Aka to learn how to sing this world's tune, to dance its dance; and at last, she thought, away from the city's endless noise, she was beginning to hear the music and to learn how to move to it.”
“She was not so naive as to think there was any necessary relation between religion and morality, or that if there was a relation it was likely to be a benevolent one.”
“By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.”
“We're not outside the world, yoz. You know? We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see?”
“To hear, one must be silent.”
“Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“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 is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.”
“Go to bed; tired is stupid.”
“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...”
“It is light that defeats the dark.”
“He had almost yielded, but not quite. He had not consented. It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.”
““For a word to be spoken,” Ged answered slowly, “there must be silence. Before, and after.” Then all at once he got up, saying, “I have no right to speak of these things. The word that was mine to say I said wrong. It is better that I keep still; I will not speak again. Maybe there is no true power but the dark.””
“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.”
“All I know is the dark, the night underground. And that’s all there really is. That’s all there is to know, in the end. The silence, and the dark. You know everything, wizard. But I know one thing — the one true thing!”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“As she stumbled forward she cried out in her mind, which was as dark, as shaken as the subterranean vault, “Forgive me. O my Masters, O unnamed ones, most ancient ones, forgive me, forgive me!”There was no answer. There had never been an answer.”
“Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.”
““Summon up a supper,” he said. “Oh, I could. On golden plates, if you like. But that’s illusion, and when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.””
“So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.”
“Young he was not, so that one had to call him old, but the word did not suit him.”
“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.”
“Those were men in whom great strength and knowledge served the will to evil and fed upon it. Whether the wizardry that serves a better end may always prove the stronger, we do not know. We hope.”
“No, I don’t understand him, but he is worth listening to.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“He resolved not to speak again until he had controlled his temper.”
“She'll die.'”
““But you knew them to be evil men—”“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!””
“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 I—though I have the power to do it—to punish and reward, playing with men’s destinies?””
“The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.”
““Is it a wicked thing, then?”“I should call it a misunderstanding, rather. A misunderstanding of life. 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.””
“To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.”
“The Dyer backed away from him another step and stood watching him, the exaltation in his face clouding slowly over until it was replaced by a strange, heavy look; it was as if reasoning thought were laboring to break through the storm of words and feelings and visions that confused him. Finally he turned around without a word and began to run back down the road, into the haze of dust that had not yet settled on his tracks.”
““Well,” he said. “Strange roads have strange guides. Let’s go on.””
“The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars.”
“What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.”
““In innocence there is no strength against evil,” said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. “But there is strength in it for good.””
“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.”
““The first lesson on Roke, and the last is, Do what is needful! And no more.”“They do.””
““What harm have the trees done them?” he said. “Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men.””
“One man may as easily destroy, as govern: be King or Anti-King.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
““A king has soldiers, servants, messengers, lieutenants. He governs through his servants. Where are the servants of this—Anti-king?”“In our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live! The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple.””
“To see a candle’s light, one must take it into a dark place.”
“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.”
““There’s nothing to fear, Lebannen,” he said gently, mockingly. “They were only the dead.””
““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 the 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.””
“Her left hand reminded her of its existence, and she looked round to see what was scratching the heel of her hand. It was a tiny thistle, crouched in a crack in the sandstone, barely lifting its colorless spikes into the light and wind. It nodded stiffly as the wind blew, resisting the wind, rooted in rock. She gazed at it for a long time.”
“A great deal of her obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with words and ideas. Nobody had ever taught her to think consecutively. Nobody had ever listened to what she said. All that was expected, all that was wanted of her was muddle, mystery, mumbling. She was a witchwoman. She had nothing to do with clear meaning.”
“Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.”
“If they come prying they can leave curious.”
“And I know that 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....”
““Is it different, then, for men and for women?”“What isn’t, dearie?””
“A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.”
““But now you've come too far, and I warn you, woman! I will not have you set foot on this domain. And if you cross my will or dare so much as speak to me again, I will have you driven from Re Albi, and off the Overfell, with the dogs at your heels. Have you understood me?”“No,” Tenar said, “I have never understood men like you.””
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“Is power that—an emptiness?”
“It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.”
“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.”
“Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.”
““She obeys me, but only because she wants to.”“It’s the only justification for obedience,” Ged observed.”
“It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.”
“O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn’t then.”
“All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.”
“Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.”
“There’s no way to use power for good.”
“There’s people all over these parts, and maybe beyond, who think, as you said, that nobody can be wise alone. So these people try to hold to each other.”
“It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.”
“Highdrake said that to make love is to unmake power.”
““The solution lies in secrecy,” said Medra. “But so does the problem.””
“Ignorant power is a bane!”
“How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn’t saved, isn’t taught?”
“The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.”
“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.”
““It always seemed to me they’re sort of alike,” he said, “magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.””
““What’s that all about?” Golden said to his wife, a rhetorical question. She looked at him and said nothing, a non-rhetorical answer.”
“To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.”
“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.”
“You’ll know what to say when the time comes. That’s the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it. And the rest is silence.”
“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 or worthy.”
“Maybe that’s what the Masters are afraid of. Maybe celibacy isn’t as necessary as the Rule of Roke teaches. Maybe it’s not a way of keeping the power pure, but of keeping the power to themselves.”
“Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.”
“Obsessed with tricking the girl, he had fallen into the trap he laid for her. Bitterly he recognised that he was always believing his own lies, caught in nets he had elaborately woven.”
“Before the gods and after, always, are the streams. Caves, stones, hills. Trees. The earth. The darkness of the earth.”
“She knew it, but she did not want to know it.”
“What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.”
“There’s seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.”
“All or nothing at all, 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?”
“The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes.”
“I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.”
“Manipulated, one manipulates others.”
“So the year went on, a dark year, though now each day had that one bright hour at its dawn.”
“Statesmen remember things selectively.”
“The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.”
“Greed puts out the sun.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
““It is not right to want to die,” the Summoner said....“For the very old, the very ill, it may be. But life is given us. Surely it’s wrong not to hold and treasure that great gift!”“Death also is given us,” said the king.”
“I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that I 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 lived, the breath I breathed.”
“There is nothing important except people. 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 one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.”
“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”
“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.”
“Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“He knew that 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.”
“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. You have to...be in touch. He isn’t in touch. 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 doesn’t make any difference if his end is good; means are all we’ve got.”
“How could anybody think this man was sick? All right, so he had funny dreams. That was better than being plain mean and hateful, like about one quarter of the people she had ever met.”
“But maybe you're just as glad he’s not a shrink, eh? Awful to have your spouse analyzing your unconscious desires across the dinner table, eh?”
“He looked at the machine, its cabinets all standing open; it should be destroyed, he thought. But he had no idea how to do it, nor any will to try. Destruction was not his line; and a machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.”
“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.”
“I haven't any strength, I haven't any character, I'm a born tool. I haven't any destiny. All I have is dreams. And now other people run them.”
“As I refuse violence, I refuse to serve the violent.”
“Indeed, until she had met Lev at school, it had not occurred to her that anyone might prefer to speak a plain fact rather than a lie that sounded well. People said what suited their purposes, when they were serious; and when they weren’t serious, they talked without meaning anything at all.”
““Why are you always so full of answers?”“Because life’s so full of questions.””
“Why should he remember her? Why should she remember him? She had other things to think about. She was a grown woman. She had to face life. Even if all life had to show her was a locked door, and behind the locked door, no room.”
“When we’ve agreed that something ought to be done, or not done, we get very stubborn. And when that meets up with another stubbornness, it can make a kind of war, a struggle of ideas, the only kind of war anybody ever wins.”
“They had learned how to listen for the sense of the meeting, not the voice of the loudest. They had learned that they must judge each time whether obedience was necessary and right, or misplaced and wrong. They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit’s strength lies in holding fast to the truth.”
“Easy victories aren’t worth winning.”
“In the self-important, Falco reflected, there is always room for a little more self-importance.”
“If I don’t speak truth I can’t seek truth.”
“Going was easy. Keep on going was hard.”
“Armed men don’t sit down and talk.”
“And the rest, all the rest. All the days and lights and winds and years that would have been, and that would not be, that should be and were not, because he was dead. Shot dead on the road, in the wind, at twenty-one. His mountains unclimbed, never to be climbed.”
“Nobody had made this wilderness, and there was no evil in it and no good; it simply was.”
“She too had lost her luck, and known death, and gone on.”
“What would that 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.”
“To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.”
“He always asked, why thus? why this way, not another way? I answered: Because in what we do daily and in the way we do it, we enact the gods. He said: Then the gods are only what we do. I said: In what we do rightly, the gods are.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.”
“Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.”
“What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.”
“It may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.”
“I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying. It would be foolish to worry about anything while one died.”
“What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the greatest revolution 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.”
“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.”
“There was a pretty prince of Troy named Paris. He and a Greek queen ran off together. Her husband called the other kings of Greece together, and they went to Troy, a great army in a thousand beaked ships, to get the woman back. Helen was her name." "Lavinia, these people were Greeks.”
“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.”
“Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?”
“Why must there be war?" "Oh Lavinia, what a woman's question that is! Because men are men.”
“They say Mars absolves the warrior from the crimes of war, but those who were not the warriors, those for whom the war was said to be fought, even though they never wanted it to be fought, who absolves them?”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
“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?”
“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.”
“It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“We read books to find out who we are.”
“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.”
“The artist deals in 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.”
“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.”
“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.”
“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 knew it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we did not know.”
“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.”
“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?”
“To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.”
“As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.”
“What's to gain by silence?”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“Sometimes one’s very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.”
“Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.”
“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.”
“If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there's no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little kids can't do it; babies are morally monsters—completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.”
“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”
“Mede spoke with amused tolerance, as physicists generally speak of biologists.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“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.”
“No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty.”
“There is not much good spending twelve hours a day in a black hole in the ground all your life long if there’s nothing there, no secret, no treasure, nothing hidden.”
“Shelley was kicked out of Oxford—I think the story is unauthenticated, but who cares—because he painted a sign on the end wall of a dead-end alley: THIS WAY TO HEAVEN. I feel that every now and then his sign needs repainting.”
“Hughes, who had entered the space program from astrophysics, came with a very good record, in fact a brilliant one. This troubled many of his military superiors, to whom high intelligence was a code word for instability and insubordination.”
“They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!”
“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.”
“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. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life.”
“Favoritism, elitism, leader-worship, they crept back and cropped out everywhere. But she had never hoped to see them eradicated in her lifetime, in one generation; only Time works the great changes.”
“After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“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.”
“What was the good working for freedom all your life and ending up without any freedom at all?”
“What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.”
““Long ago we parted,” said the slight, still man of the Fiia. “Longer ago we were one. What we are not, they are. What we are, they are not. Think of the sunlight and the grass and the trees that bear fruit, Semley; think that not all roads that lead down lead up as well.””
“The High-Intelligence Life Forms of the planet, of which there were at least three species, all of low technological achievement, they would ignore or enslave or extirpate, whichever was most convenient. For to an aggressive people only technology mattered.”
“It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man’s fate is not important.He could not endure those remembered words.”
“All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.”
“Men who fight wars in Winter don’t live till Spring.”
“He detested them for forcing helplessness upon him.”
“Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger.”
“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, and now we dare not go a hundred 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. We did man’s work.”
“Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol twisted aside, and the lie come to be.”
“He liked the vast openness of sky and prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so immense a domain to be alone in.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“The more defensive a society, the more conformist.”
“The juniper-scented liquor had volatilized his thoughts; he should be thinking that madness caused this man to call himself a king, but was thinking rather that kingship had driven this man mad.”
“The game must be played, and played their way, though they made all the rules and had all the skill. His ineptitude did not matter. His honesty did. He was staked now totally on one belief: that an honest man cannot be cheated, that truth, if the game be played through right to the end, will lead to truth.”
“We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God’s truth, the universe at once began to exist.”
“It seemed, at least, that they had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.”
“Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.”
“They prevented men from doing anything. But they did nothing themselves. They did not rule, they only blighted.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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. 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.”
“I forgot, being too interested myself, that he’s a king, and does not see things rationally, but as a king.”
“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. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“One voice, speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time; plenty of time.”
“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.”
“When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.”
“I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.”
“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.”
““We in the Handdara don’t want answers. It’s hard to avoid them, but we try to.”“To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.””
“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“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.”
“A man can trust his luck, but a society can’t; and cultural change, like random mutation, may make things chancier. So they have gone very slowly. At any one point in their history a hasty observer would say that all technological progress and diffusion had ceased. Yet it never has. Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.”
“If civilization has an opposite, it is war.”
““The mission I am on overrides all personal debts and loyalties.”“If so,” said the stranger with fierce certainty, “it is an immoral mission.””
“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.”
“Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.”
“This, at least, is the accepted explanation, though like most economic explanations it seems, under certain lights, to omit the main point.”
“It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.”
“I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.”
“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”
“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.”
“To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, 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.”
“It is not human to be without shame and without desire.”
“Mr. Ai, we’ve seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they’d seem the same to us.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“The First Envoy to a world always comes alone. One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.”
“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.”
“What is more arrogant than honesty?”
“It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
“Light is the left hand of darkness like the end and the way.”
“A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.”
“The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.”
“Truth is a matter of the imagination.”
“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 so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?”
“Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.”
“Character and training disposed him not to interfere in other mens’s business. His job was to find out what they did, and his inclination was to let them go on doing it. He preferred to be enlightened, rather than to enlighten; to seek facts rather than the Truth. 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?””
“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.”