Search quotes

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 13 14 16 17 19 20 22 23 24 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 ▲ ▼

Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
d015ad1	But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord." "It might to keep it open."		fear power diplomacy	Ursula K. Le Guin
a57220d	But 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 must follow knowledge, and serve need.		magic mage wizard	Ursula K. Le Guin
2894f82	The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. ... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, unpredictable, inevit..		religion philosophy	Ursula K. Le Guin
8402178	Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsin..			Ursula K. Le Guin
366a853	You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.			Ursula K. Le Guin
cb097a4	The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes.		nature life evil	Ursula K. Le Guin
586d4d0	Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive			Ursula K. Le Guin
ae1b637	Not even need and love can defeat fate...		love need	Ursula K. Le Guin
4af1955	The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.		travel metaphorical research journey	Ursula K. Le Guin
e340a16	We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.			Ursula K. Le Guin
613d747	Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.		dark life earthsea self	Ursula K. Le Guin
9ee3607	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 ..		war morality right-and-wrong morals	Ursula K. Le Guin
de6aa49	Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the love of nature" seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock...		nature fantasy the-dispossessed science-fiction	Ursula K. Le Guin
aba5258	If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you loose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death." "That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and ..			Ursula K. Le Guin
b8fe4d3	A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.			Ursula K. Le Guin
3977c85	Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible th..			Ursula K. Le Guin
8552cb3	Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.			Ursula K. Le Guin
d1515df	Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.		life equilibrium	Ursula K. Le Guin
545f62d	To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.		mind spirit religion	Ursula K. Le Guin
c16bef2	To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free. To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.			Ursula K. Le Guin
38328c6	In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.		loss religion helplessness	Ursula K. Le Guin
3c6061d	The Gethenians do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imaginations to accept. After all, what is the first question we ask about a newborn baby? ....there is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protected/ protective. One is respected and judged only as a human being. You cannot cast a Gethnian in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards 'him' a corresponding role dependant on your ..			Ursula K. Le Guin
3c9a3fb	Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?			Ursula K. Le Guin
867e081	Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.			Ursula K. Le Guin
744fb40	The wise needn't ask, the fool asks in vain.			Ursula K. Le Guin
62a797f	Why are men afraid of women?" "If your strength is only the other's weakness, you live in fear," Ged said. "Yes; but women seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves." "Are they ever taught to trust themselves?" Ged asked, and as he spoke Therru came in on her work again. His eyes and Tenar's met. "No," she said. "Trust is not what we're taught." She watched the child stack the wood in the box. "If power were trust," she sa..			Ursula K. Le Guin
ebc1444	A rock is a good thing, too, you know. If the Isles of Earthsea were all made of diamond, we'd lead a hard life here. Enjoy the illusions, lad, and let the rocks be rocks.			Ursula K. Le Guin
eb5f1a7	This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.			Ursula K. Le Guin
fe23145	A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.		world forest ecology word	Ursula K. Le Guin
f16d5ef	One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies...			Ursula K. Le Guin
0d5f50e	If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.		power	Ursula K. Le Guin
55feb19	You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.		home	Ursula K. Le Guin
e8f470c	There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time. As all the stars may be reflected in a round raindrop falling in the night: so too do all the stars reflect the raindrop. There is neither darkness nor death, for all things are, in the Light of the Moment, and their end and their beginning are one.			Ursula K. Le Guin
86cde26	I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners--almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women... women tend to eat less... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the soc..			Ursula K. Le Guin
71fa96f	We broke the world to make it whole...			Ursula K. Le Guin
5111592	Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction -- you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.		life roads direction	Ursula K. Le Guin
707555f	Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.			Ursula K. Le Guin
f3c8859	Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal, The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck..			Ursula K. Le Guin
cfc1c37	I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.			Ursula K. Le Guin
fef3124	What is a woman's power then?" she asked. "I don't think we know." "When has a woman power because she's a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while..." "In her house, maybe." She looked around the kitchen. "But the doors are shut," she said, "the doors are locked." "Because you're valuable." "Oh yes. We're precious. So long as we're powerless."			Ursula K. Le Guin
e9c1dca	The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everythin..			Ursula K. Le Guin
75da91f	I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls.			Ursula K. Le Guin
53277aa	If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw th..		science maths physics	Ursula K. Le Guin
798dc4f	A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.			Ursula K. Le Guin

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 13 14 16 17 19 20 22 23 24 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 ▲ ▼