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f447f72
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Am I supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After all, he's just a man ... He's about fifty years old, and he's bald. And I'll bet he has to cut his toenails too like any other man. I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is, he'll be much godlier after he's dead.
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fantasy
earthsea
kings
fantasy-fiction
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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9d3b7c0
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It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.
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history
poetry
life
love
inspirational
life-philosophy
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ba84a4b
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We demand a rebellious spirit of those who have no chance to learn that rebellion is possible, but we the privileged hold still and see no evil.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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946ff27
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I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination. I
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e8ab4e0
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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.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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336bad4
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Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?' ...'Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels.
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living
life
inevitability
dying
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b4653b7
|
We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ee66f4f
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The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority.
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poetry
meaning
tao-te-ching
translation
prose
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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097795c
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So the unwanting soul sees what's hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0b968b0
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close up, a world's all dirt and rocks... The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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479551c
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For heroes do not make history--that is the historian's job--but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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bdbed7a
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There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no act or art or power can teach me, what I have never learned.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b5b4be7
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I tried to think about what he had asked me to do, to step so far beyond myself. I found it difficult to think about. It was as if it hung over me, this huge choice I must make, this future I could not imagine.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ff5921a
|
There's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly."
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literature
humor
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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61ebf07
|
The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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69d58e2
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Who do you think is lying to us?" Shevek demanded. Placid, Bedap met his gaze. "Who, brother? Who but ourselves?"
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a83fd06
|
There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.
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language
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1133111
|
Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men.
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men
women
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c4d3538
|
I saw that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't save each other. Or ourselves." "What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You're denying brotherhood, Shevek!" the tall girl cried. "No--no, I'm not. I'm trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins--it begins in shared pain."
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solidarity
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8275d7d
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Man's singularity is his divinity.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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42f4fd2
|
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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ab6b1b1
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None of this is spare time. I can't spare it.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4ea1d56
|
They way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn't very different from what historians of the so-called real world do. Even if we are present at some historic event, so we comprehend it - can we even remember it - until we can tell it as a story? And for events in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. P..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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bbed1f8
|
You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identit..
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identity
transience
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d50eee1
|
Butun duvarlar gibi iki anlamli, iki yuzluydu. Neyin iceride, neyin disarida oldugu, duvarin hangi yanindan baktiginiza bagliydi.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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70ad12a
|
Old age isn't a state of mind. It's an existential situation.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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568ff6f
|
That sacrificiality was what Takver had spoken of recognizing in herself when she was pregnant, and she had spoken with a degree of horror, of self-disgust, because she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and ends was, to her too, false. For her as for him, there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stoppi..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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426ee0b
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Words are my matter--my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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53fe2bc
|
No, I don't understand him, but he is worth listening to.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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5c4c451
|
The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be (as Nim put it) "tied down to childbearing," implies that no one is quite so thoroughly "tied down" here as women, elsewhere are likely to be--psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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48ee156
|
Arren was silent, pondering this. Presently the mage said, speaking softly, "Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed. On every act the Balance of t..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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bea78d3
|
Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.
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lying
philosophy
truth
thought-provoking
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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165484c
|
Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird feeder.
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sensitivity
nervousness
worry
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d522be4
|
You are rich. You own. We are poor. We lack. You have. We do not have. Everything is beautiful here, only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces. The men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels. There you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit, because our men and women are free possessing nothing. They ..
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ownership
liberty
possession
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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01217e8
|
They praised his modesty and did not listen to him, for listening is a rare gift, and men will have their heroes.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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772c39c
|
As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Wa..
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wisdom
earthsea
animals
childhood
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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5e81bb6
|
In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way round: the university conferred superiority on the man.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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dceee82
|
What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we have is here, now.
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inspirational
in-the-moment
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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fd24939
|
How men feared women! she thought, walking among the late-flowering roses. Not as individuals, but women when they talked together, worked together, spoke up for one another - then men saw plots, cabals, constraints, traps being laid. Of course they were right. Women were likely, as women, to take the next generations part, not this one's; they wove the links men saw as chains, the bonds men saw as bondage.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2d3ecca
|
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel - or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel - is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become... A person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what i..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a4e5043
|
They have no gods. They work magic, and think they are gods themselves. But they are not. And when they die, they (...) become dust and bone, and their ghosts whine on the wind a little while till the wind blows them away. They do not have immortal souls.
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magic
fantasy
tombs-of-atuan
ursula-k-le-guin
sorcery
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
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bcbb467
|
A grating sound came from the dragon's throat . . . "You offer me safety! You threaten me! With what?" "With your name, Yevaud."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a0cc6b0
|
An artist makes the world her world. An artist makes her world the world. For a little while. For as long as it takes to look at or listen or to watch or read the work of art. Like a crystal, the work of art seems to contain the whole, and to imply eternity.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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658a1d4
|
For to keep dark the mind of the mageborn, that is a dangerous thing.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |