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 GUINYou sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
URSULA K. LE GUINAny 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 GUINPeople who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
URSULA K. LE GUINWhat 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 GUINOnly 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.
URSULA K. LE GUINAnd though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.
URSULA K. LE GUINIt is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
URSULA K. LE GUINTo have a choice at all is to be privileged.
URSULA K. LE GUINIt 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 GUINHate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
URSULA K. LE GUINA 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.
URSULA K. LE GUINTranslation 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 GUINThe story is not in the plot but in the telling.
URSULA K. LE GUINWe read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
URSULA K. LE GUINEither we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
URSULA K. LE GUIN