Ursula K. Le Guin quotes - page 5

Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Success is somebody else's failure. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
It always seemed to me they're sort of alike,” he said, "magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. "He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. or wonder who, after all, you are. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
"She obeys me, but only because she wants to.” "It's the only justification for obedience,” Ged observed. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything, Anarchism, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born? View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
To see a candle's light, one must take it into a dark place. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God's truth, the universe at once began to exist. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
In innocence there is no strength against evil,” said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. "But there is strength in it for good. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught? View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
J. Rowling has many virtues, but originality isn't one of them. That hurt." View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
One of the historians of Darranda said: To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
The first lesson on Roke, and the last is, Do what is needful! And no more.” "The lessons in between, then, must consist in learning what is needful. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility. Who am I-though I have the power to do it-to punish and reward, playing with men's destinies? View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
But maybe you're just as glad he's not a shrink, eh? Awful to have your spouse analyzing your unconscious desires across the dinner table, eh? View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
On Aka, god is a word without referent. No capital letters. No creator, only creation. No eternal father to reward and punish, justify injustice, ordain cruelty, offer salvation. Eternity not an endpoint but a continuity. Primal division of being into material and spiritual only as two-as-one, or one in two aspects. [...] The Akan system is a spiritual discipline with spiritual goals, but they're exactly the same goals it seeks for bodily and ethical well-being. Right action is its own reward. Dharma without karma. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
I haven't any strength, I haven't any character, I'm a born tool. I haven't any destiny. All I have is dreams. And now other people run them. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
But now you've come too far, and I warn you, woman! I will not have you set foot on this domain. And if you cross my will or dare so much as speak to me again, I will have you driven from Re Albi, and off the Overfell, with the dogs at your heels. Have you understood me?” "No,” Tenar said, "I have never understood men like you. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
She had come to Aka to learn how to sing this world's tune, to dance its dance; and at last, she thought, away from the city's endless noise, she was beginning to hear the music and to learn how to move to it. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to 'a war against' whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the "right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin