The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
URSULA K. LE GUINThe worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
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 -
Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
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 -
As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. …But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
URSULA K. LE GUIN