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 GUINf we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we’ll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
-
The creative adult is the child who has survived.
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 -
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 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 GUIN -
Success is somebody else’s failure.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
URSULA 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 GUIN -
The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Every group we belong to – by gender, sex, race, religion, age – is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
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 GUIN -
Besides, when you say you’re a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it’s kind of irresistible.
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 -
Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
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 -
We read books to find out who we are.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
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 -
There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
URSULA K. LE GUIN