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42cea85
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We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.
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choice
ears
eyes
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e89d4c9
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To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
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guilt
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f362f53
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We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age. We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la meme chose, plus ca change.
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fiction
imagination
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7b49987
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There is no kingdom like the forests.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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46b05bf
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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.
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nature
living
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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50f4c5c
|
Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible... It was more than diginity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved. The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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5f9e885
|
Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience.
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mastery
patience
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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273745c
|
What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d1e13ba
|
Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f0642a3
|
When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. "Do they expect students not to be anarchists?" he said. "What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up"
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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54376e6
|
Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer....The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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eaee8b5
|
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..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a0577a2
|
You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.
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reality
dreams
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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187c276
|
A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.
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freedom
tenar
the-tombs-of-atuan
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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3761e05
|
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."
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good-and-evil
war
life
ethics
morals
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d73f14f
|
In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a1dddfd
|
In many college English courses the words "myth" and "symbol" are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain't no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbil..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0703aa7
|
A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d1a0f24
|
The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society formed upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.
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revolution
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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3675f8a
|
Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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632d37b
|
You are beautiful," Tenar said in a different tone. "Listen to me, Therru. Come here. You have scars, ugly scars, because an ugly, evil thing was done to you. People see the scars. But they see you, too, and you aren't the scars. You aren't ugly. You aren't evil. You are Therru, and beautiful. You are Therru who can work, and walk, and run, and dance, beautifully, in a red dress."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7c6ee1f
|
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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imaginative-fiction
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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598dcd3
|
I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we l..
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slavery
love
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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bf389ad
|
The light is the left hand of darkness
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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eacbe7e
|
He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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9031950
|
So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. We must choose and choose again. Th..
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good-and-evil
morality
choice
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8232090
|
Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of its existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering - unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.
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suffering
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1b6f45f
|
One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a1a4485
|
One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness... Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4ded038
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For in this love he now felt there was compassion: without which love is untempered, and is not whole, and does not last.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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887a3c4
|
To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here "all roads lead to Mishnory." To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk in a different road."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7ffc099
|
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 that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
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happiness
omelas
walk-away
unknown
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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be3454e
|
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side you were on.
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walls
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6ee3e75
|
The best I can say, it's like this. A man's in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell ... It's hard and strong, that shell, and it's all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that's all. That's all there is. A woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into th..
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men
women
womanhood
fantasy-fiction
manhood
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ab43927
|
The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
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goodness
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d9f96de
|
On the blank leaf glued to the inner back cover I drew the double curve within the circle, and blacked the yin half of the symbol, then pushed it back to my companion. 'Do you know that sign?' He looked at it a long time with a strange look, but he said, 'No.' 'It's found on Earth, and on Hain-Davenant, and on Chiffewar. It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Fema..
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yin-and-yang
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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799deb4
|
I found out I was in love with you, winter before last," she said. "I wasn't going to say anything about it because - well, you know. If you'd felt anything like that for me, you'd have known I did. But it wasn't both of us. So there was no good in it. But then, when you told us you're leaving ... At first I thought, all the more reason to say nothing. But then I thought, that wouldn't be fair. To me, partly. Love has a right to be spoken. ..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b3d3a62
|
Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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9204739
|
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 ..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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85a8c23
|
If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?" "Hah!" went Tenar; and presently, with some cunning, she said, "Haven't there been queens? Weren't they women of power?" "A queen's only a she-king," said Ged. She snorted. "I mean, men give her power. They let her use their power. But it isn't hers, is it? It isn't because she's a woman that she's powerful, but despite it."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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dd3bc08
|
You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Fortelling?" "No..." "To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ae86485
|
Later, when Ged thought back upon that night, he knew that had none touched him when he lay thus spirit-lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet in that wisdom Ged saw something akin to his own power, something that went as deep as wizardry. From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one w..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8c56d2a
|
That is between me and my shadow.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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67ecc56
|
All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life -- science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fictio..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |