Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #1
. . . 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 Quote #2
... privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #3
... there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #4
...[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 Quote #5
...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 Quote #6
...There's no right answer
to the wrong question.
Now what do we do?Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #7
...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 Quote #8
...you play the instrument you have.
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #9
«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 Quote #10
a book is a box of words until you open it.
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #11
A book won't move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. A book won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a good novel well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is a collaboration, an act of participation. No wonder not everybody is up to it.
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #12
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 Quote #13
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 Quote #14
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 Quote #15
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 don’t read that space-ship stuff. No, no, they read Literature—realism. Like The Help, or Fifty Shades of Grey.
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #16
A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #17
A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #18
A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government in earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #19
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #20
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. Le Guin Quote #21
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 Quote #22
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 Quote #23
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 Quote #24
Age and illness made one a dualist
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #25
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 Quote #26
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 Quote #27
Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #28
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 Quote #29
An Odonian’s goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote #30
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
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