Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.
URSULA K. LE GUINBefore the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.
URSULA K. LE GUINBut 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 GUINWhat is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
URSULA K. LE GUINWe’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
URSULA K. LE GUINA wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
URSULA K. LE GUINIf a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
URSULA K. LE GUINFor all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.
URSULA K. LE GUINWhat goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
URSULA K. LE GUINIf 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 GUINYou can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
URSULA K. LE GUINIf 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 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 GUINWe are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.
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 GUINA writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… By using words well they strengthen their souls.
URSULA K. LE GUIN