Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
URSULA K. LE GUINYou have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
-
Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.
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 -
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 -
The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
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 -
But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
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 -
Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.
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