Hope is a slow business.
URSULA K. LE GUINTo be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
-
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 -
First sentences are doors to worlds.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The creative adult is the child who has survived.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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 -
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 -
But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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 -
Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this:
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
What is life without incompatible realities?
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Besides, when you say you’re a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it’s kind of irresistible.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
What good is music? None … 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, ‘
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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 -
All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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