The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe light is the left hand of darkness.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
-
To hear, one must be silent.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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 -
Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
URSULA 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 GUIN -
But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
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 -
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 -
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
URSULA 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 GUIN -
We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.
URSULA 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 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 GUIN -
The presence of the trees was very strong…The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
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 -
Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
URSULA K. LE GUIN