Search quotes

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 13 14 16 17 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 ▲ ▼

Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
8c45d95	A warm body sighed in the darkness inside the little bright object balanced elegantly in the orbit of the moon.			Ursula K. Le Guin
e974b8b	The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means. Orr			Ursula K. Le Guin
086ebbc	So many of his problems were of a kind that other people did not understand, that he got used to working them out for himself, in silence.			Ursula K. Le Guin
ca43838	He lost weight; he walked light on the earth. Lack of physical labour, lack of variety of occupation, lack of social and sexual intercourse, none of these appeared to him as lacks, but as freedom.			Ursula K. Le Guin
96c19f4	She touched his face and tied his hair back for him. Her hands were cool. He had never felt anything pleasanter in all his life than the touch of her hands. He reached out for her hand. She was not there, she had gone.			Ursula K. Le Guin
fdea3ae	He gave way to the fear that had come with her, the sense of the breaking of promises, the incoherence of Time. He broke.			Ursula K. Le Guin
8109913	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 lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. 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."			Ursula K. Le Guin
4322330	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.			Ursula K. Le Guin
20267f5	It goes right back to the idea of the Power of Positive Thinking, which is so strong in America because it fits in so well with the Power of Commercial Advertising and with the Power of Wishful Thinking, aka the American Dream.			Ursula K. Le Guin
e15338d	Ultimately you write alone.			Ursula K. Le Guin
3392694	She had made these with scrap wire and tools from the craft supply depot, and called them Occupations of Uninhabited Space.			Ursula K. Le Guin
8716ee2	My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I			Ursula K. Le Guin
6756d16	You won't be running marathons and lifting weights. You may have trouble getting up the stairs. You may have trouble just getting out of bed. You may have trouble getting used to hurting all the time. And it isn't likely to get better as the years go on.			Ursula K. Le Guin
42a44f9	The artist deals with 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.			Ursula K. Le Guin
f4b29af	In other ways my story didn't follow the tradition. Its subversive elements attracted little attention, no doubt because I was deliberately sneaky about them. A great many white readers in 1967 were not ready to accept a brown-skinned hero. But they weren't expecting one. I didn't make an issue of it, and you have to be well into the book before you realize that Ged, like most of the characters, isn't white.			Ursula K. Le Guin
e612a24	Alas, I had no power, at that time, to combat the flat refusal of many cover departments to put people of color on a book jacket. So, through many later, lily-white Geds, Ruth Robbins's painting for the first edition--the fine, strong profile of a young man with copper-brown skin--was, to me, the book's one true cover.			Ursula K. Le Guin
380275e	No era el quien hacia las cosas: las cosas lo hacian a el. Habia estado en manos de otra gente. La voluntad no habia actuado. No habia tenido necesidad de actuar. La voluntad habia estado en el comienzo, ella habia creado este momento y las paredes que ahora lo rodeaban.		español	Ursula K. Le Guin
5b9db34	Be still!" the Head Isle-Man said roughly, for he knew, as did most of them, that a wizard may have subtle ways of telling the truth, and may keep the truth to himself, but that if he says a thing the thing is as he says."			Ursula K. Le Guin
21c109d	Homer truly doesn't take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.			Ursula K. Le Guin
c57a528	Lanet olsun!" dedi yuksek sesle. Pravca, kufur etmek icin iyi bir dil degildi. Cinsellik pis bir sey olmayinca, gunaha girme diye bir sey de olmayinca kufretmek zordur."			Ursula K. Le Guin
805e753	If piano is the opposite of forte, graceful chitchat with strangers is definitely my piano.			Ursula K. Le Guin
293770c	I came away from both these concerts marveling that while our republic tears itself apart and our species frantically hurries to destroy its own household, yet we go on building with vibrations in the air, in the spirit--making this music, this intangible, beautiful, generous thing.			Ursula K. Le Guin
fa8c5bd	So God is dead, at least as a swearword, but hate and feces keep going strong. Le roi est mort, vive le fucking roi.			Ursula K. Le Guin
9e5443a	What to make of a diminished thing?			Ursula K. Le Guin
17fa5b2	Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?			Ursula K. Le Guin
a6402c0	Ged said at last, speaking low, "There is a thing that I fear, Estarriol. I fear it more if you are with me when I go. There in the Hands in the dead end of the inlet I turned upon the shadow, it was within my hands' reach, and I seized it - I tried to seize it. And there was nothing I could hold. I could not defeat it. It fled, I followed. But that may happen again, and yet again. I have no power over the thing. There may be neither death ..			Ursula K. Le Guin
be6b226	As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage.			Ursula K. Le Guin
e64989d	A lot of snow out of one cloud, and it grows thicker.			Ursula K. Le Guin
bc0085e	Until that moment Vetch had watched him with an anxious dread, for he was not sure what had happened there in the dark land. He did not know if this was Ged in the boat with him, and his hand had been for hours ready to the anchor, to stave in the boat's planking and sink her there in midsea, rather than carry back to the harbors of Earthsea the evil thing that he feared might have taken Ged's look and form. Now when he saw his friend and h..			Ursula K. Le Guin
f262cc4	It might seem strange that on an island fifty miles wide, in a village under cliffs that stare out forever on the sea, a child may grow to manhood never having stepped in a boat or dipped his finger in salt water, but so it is. Farmer, goatherd, cattleherd, hunter or artisan, the landsman looks at the ocean as a salt unsteady realm that has nothing to do with him at all. The village two days' walk from his village is a foreign land, and the..			Ursula K. Le Guin
2f8df6f	It takes a while to spoil a world, but it can be done.		earth	Ursula K. Le Guin
d8bf3b4	All the mystery and wisdom of the masters, when it's out in the daylight, doesn't amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade. Wonderful illusions. But people don't want to know that. They want the illusions, the mysteries. Who can blame them? There's so little in life that's beautiful and worthy.			Ursula K. Le Guin
4450359	The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he's just had a woman or just killed another man. That wasn't original, he'd read it in some old books; but it was true. That was why he liked to imagine scenes like that. Even if the creechies weren't actually men.			Ursula K. Le Guin
536158b	History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.			Ursula K. Le Guin
0d241c4	I hate complaining to strangers--you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well--			Ursula K. Le Guin
262d721	All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people. Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine			Ursula K. Le Guin
bcd646c	I hold it self-evident that so long as we live in a man's world, as we still do, women have a right to create enclaves of learning or work where, instead of obeying or imitating what men do and want, women can shape what they do, how they do it, and why they do it, in their own way and on their own terms.			Ursula K. Le Guin
919907b	It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us..			Ursula K. Le Guin
a188c4c	I think of when I was in high school in the 1940s: the white girls got their hair crinkled up by chemicals and heat so it would curl, and the black girls got their hair mashed flat by chemicals and heat so it wouldn't curl. Home perms hadn't been invented yet, and a lot of kids couldn't afford these expensive treatments, so they were wretched because they couldn't follow the rules, the rules of beauty. Beauty always has rules. It's a game. ..			Ursula K. Le Guin
ddeaa25	But I guess I can't, or my subconscious can't, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you're trying to use, not my rational mind. Maybe rationally I could conceive of the human species not trying to kill each other off by nations, in fact rationally ..			Ursula K. Le Guin
d88476a	Hope is a slighter, tougher thing even than trust, he thought, pacing his room as the soundless, vague lightning flashed overhead. In a good season one trusts life; in a bad season one only hopes, But they are of the same essence: they are the mind's indispensable relationship with other minds, with the world, and with time. Without trust, a man lives, but not a human life; without hope, he dies. When there is no relationship, where hands d..		murder human trust victim slave	Ursula K. Le Guin
0f1bc58	Todos tenemos que aprender a inventarnos una vida, crearla, imaginarla. Necesitamos que nos ensenen esas capacidades; necesitamos guias que nos muestren como hacerlo. Si no lo hacemos nuestras vidas acaban siendo controladas por los demas.		vida	Ursula K. Le Guin
e959c80	The racism, misogyny, and counter-rationality of the reactionary right in American politics for the last several years is a frightening exhibition of the destructive force of anger deliberately nourished by hate, encouraged to rule thought, invited to control behavior. I hope our republic survives this orgy of self-indulgent rage.		racism rage politics	Ursula K. Le Guin
8b587d6	To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well. It's unwise, though, to think you know how it's going to go, or how it's going to end. That's to be known only when it's over. And even when it's over, even when it's somebody else's life, somebody who lived a hundred years ago, whose story I've heard told time and again, while I'm hearing it I hope and fear as if I didn't know how it w..			Ursula K. Le Guin

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 13 14 16 17 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 ▲ ▼