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
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Ursula K. Le Guin on city
Ursula K. Le Guin161 quotes“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.”
More from Ursula K. Le Guin
The light is the left hand of darkness.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin First sentences are doors to worlds.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula 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 GuinUrsula 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 GuinUrsula K. Le Guin People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin As men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation – you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin
Original quotes
From our community writers
I am the universe, and every possibility belongs to me.
Courtney PeppernellCourtney Peppernell The only thing that changed about you is me.
Elaine HaysElaine Hays He is my heaven and my hell. Serving passion and poison with the same spoon, and i am a sucker for a taste.
Laura Natoli-KearneyLaura Natoli-Kearney My mistakes tell me I am quite human, but my brief flashes of brilliance tell me I am divine, too.
Rachel WolchinRachel Wolchin She now finds solace in vanilla-scented daydreams, as her soul sings away in a musical symphony of humid breaths and well-favored smiles.
Megan LaoMegan Lao Some things won’t change-some things can’t.
Julia Kellogg HenryJulia Kellogg Henry My blood is fifty percent alcohol the other half was you.
Chris AllchinChris Allchin Darling, you don’t fear love, you fear of loving wrong.
C.R. ElliottC.R. Elliott
Meet the writers
More on city
It doesn’t have to be the Grand Canyon, it could be a city street, it could be the face of another human being – Everything is full of wonder.
A.C. GraylingA.C. Grayling Ernest Hemingway was always uneasy in New York and liked being there less than in any other city he frequented.
A. E. HotchnerA. E. Hotchner I had a good mind to discontinue permanently the supply of grain to the city, reliance on which had discouraged Italian agriculture, but refrained because some politician would be bound one day to revive the dole as a means of ingratiating himself with the people.
AugustusAugustus All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.
TacitusTacitus If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.
A. Bartlett GiamattiA. Bartlett Giamatti Building the scene, going out and doing shows and connecting with the fans, cultivating the fanbase in all these cities. I’m very glad that it’s happening.
A-TrakA-Trak Nature is a petrified magic city.
NovalisNovalis And if the City falls and one survives he shall carry the City within on the roads of exile he shall be the City
Zbigniew HerbertZbigniew Herbert