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 GUINTo hear, one must be silent.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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 world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
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 -
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 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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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 -
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 -
Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
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 -
Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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