I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
URSULA K. LE GUINIn the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
-
First sentences are doors to worlds.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Well, we think that time “passes,” flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
URSULA 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 GUIN -
Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
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 -
I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
URSULA K. LE GUIN