Ursula K. Le Guin on banality
Ursula K. Le Guin161 quotes“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.”
More from 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 GuinUrsula K. Le Guin When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula 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 GuinUrsula K. Le Guin We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin 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.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula 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 GuinUrsula K. Le Guin We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula 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 GuinUrsula K. Le Guin The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin
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