Ursula K. Le Guin quotes - page 11

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
Mr. Ai, we've seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they'd seem the same to us. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
"It is not right to want to die,” the Summoner said...."For the very old, the very ill, it may be. But life is given us. Surely it's wrong not to hold and treasure that great gift!” "Death also is given us,” said the king. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Those were men in whom great strength and knowledge served the will to evil and fed upon it. Whether the wizardry that serves a better end may always prove the stronger, we do not know. We hope. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Excess is excrement. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
I raised as irreligious as a jackrabbit. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
I take a perverse pleasure in calling myself a feminist. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
England is a good country for introverts; they have a place in society for the introvert, which the United States has not. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
The law of evolution is that the strongest survives. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
And fourteen-fourteen is such a fearful age, when you find out so fast what you're capable of being, but also what a toll the world expects. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
For heroes do not make history-that is the historians' job-but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
I was afraid I'd fail. So I didn't work. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
He had waked her; he had given her what she lacked, and what few men could have given her: the sense of peril, which is the root of love. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
He had been a handsome man, when they married, fourteen years ago. A handsome, happy man, proud and kind, very good at his work. There had been a splendor to him, a wholeness. That was gone. There was no more room in the world for whole people, they took up too much space. What she had done to him was only a part of the general program for cutting him and people like him down to size, for chopping and paring and breaking up, so that in the texture of life nothing large, nothing hard, nothing grand should remain. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
What the devil do you come to me for? And burst into tears? And then tell me thanks very much for your suggestion but I shall continue to attempt the impossible? The arrogance, the unreasonableness-no, I can endure all that-but the stupidity, the absolute stupidity of artists, I cannot stand it any longer! View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
To oppose something is to maintain it. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant. View quote
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. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin