|
5b584ca
|
A related point: The job of the imagination, in making a story from experience, may be not to gussy the story up but to tone it down. The fact is, the world is unbelievably strange and human behavior is frequently so weird that no kind of narrative except farce or satire can handle it. The function of the storyteller's imagination sometimes is simply to make it more plausible.
|
|
fiction
life
storytelling
writing
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
af6d601
|
You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower; until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do ...
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
36e5c73
|
What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story . . . ? Tell me what it Means. But that's not my job, honey. That's your job.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
959d22d
|
Meaning in art isn't the same as meaning in science.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
ac81bb2
|
lot. But she never could keep off the hard drugs, she was hooked. She'd be off for a year and then bingo. She got through the Plague, but when she was thirty-eight she got a dirty needle, and it killed her. And damn if her family didn't show up and take me over. I'd never even seen them! And they put me through college and law school. And I go up there for Christmas Eve dinner every year. I'm their token Negro. But I'll tell you, what reall..
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
0a0ad9d
|
There were people who swore as an art form--performing a dazzling juncture of the inordinate and the unexpected.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
84e5769
|
This principle, getting it out of place, off-limits, the basic principle of swearing, I understand and approve.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
5403ab0
|
Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
c1c2342
|
Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter. The following must
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
c53473b
|
If plain men hide their true name from all but a few they love and trust utterly, so much more must wizardly men, being more dangerous, and more endangered. 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 that gift only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakable trust.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
9b8da81
|
A Modest Proposal: Vegempathy
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
537400d
|
moieties
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
c5170bb
|
He liked the way she began her fierce, scornful sentences so often with a weak, conciliatory 'well.' She cut the ground out from under them before they ever got going, let them hang unsupported in the void. She had courage, great courage.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
e1f6b29
|
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.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
c92f9c0
|
Huge heavy things come and stand on granite and the granite just stays there and doesn't react and doesn't give way and doesn't adapt and doesn't oblige and when the huge heavy things walk away the granite is there just the same as it was before, just exactly the same, admirably. To change granite you have to blow it up.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
15d3c95
|
I am without a face among men. I am not seen. I speak and am not heard. I come and am not welcomed. There is no place by the fire for me, nor food on the table for me, nor a bed made for me to lie in. Yet I still have my name.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
171ea94
|
Old age isn't a state of mind. It's an existential situation. Would you say to a person paralyzed from the waist down, "Oh, you aren't a cripple! You're only as paralyzed as you think you are! My cousin broke her back once but she got right over it and now she's in training for the marathon!"
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
d5fe84b
|
The unknown, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
2b23add
|
Art isn't explanation. Art is what an artist does, not what an artist explains.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
f78e2c6
|
Negare il passato significa negare il futuro. Un uomo non costruisce il proprio destino. Lo accetta o lo contrasta.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
ce2f042
|
Listen, Tenar. Heed me. You were the vessel of evil. The evil is poured out. It is done. It is buried in its own tomb. You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light, as a lamp burning holds and gives its light. I found the lamp unlit; I won't leave it on some desert island like a thing found and cast away. I'll take you to Havnor and say to the princes of Earthsea, 'Look! In the place of darkness I found the ligh..
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
b823f05
|
Encender una vela es proyectar una sombra...
|
|
fantasy
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
77b49c1
|
Solo en el silencio la palabra, solo en la oscuridad la luz, solo en la muerte la vida; el brillo del halcon brilla en el cielo vacio.
|
|
fantasy
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
377f50b
|
insofar as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void. But the void was there. This life lacked realness; it was hollow; the dream creating where there was no necessity to create, had worn thin and sleazy. If this was being, perhaps the void was better.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
979cd97
|
I'm a part of it. Not separate from it. I walk on the ground and the ground's walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
ce6d16b
|
Consider: Anyone can turn his hand to anything. This sounds very simple, but its psychological effects are incalculable. 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..
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
a1547f6
|
The Yomeshta would say that man's singularity is his divinity.' 'Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be the cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
404c3eb
|
Fatos nao sao mais solidos, coerentes, perfeitos e reais do que perolas. Mas ambos sao sensiveis.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
2135753
|
Nao sou servo de ninguem. Um homem deve projetar a propria sombra...
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
8d621fe
|
A unica coisa que torna a vida possivel e a incerteza permanente e intoleravel: nao saber o que vem depois.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
29a827c
|
Felicidade tem a ver com a razao, so pode ser conquistada pela razao. O que ganhei foi uma coisa que nao se pode conquistar, nao se pode manter e, muitas vezes, nao se pode nem reconhecer no momento; falo de jubilo.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
e7f5833
|
Um amor profundo entre duas pessoas envolve, afinal, o poder e a oportunidade de causar magoa profunda.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
3d07828
|
One day is the day for moving on, and overnight, the next day, there is no more good in moving on, because you have come where you were going to.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
9b185e8
|
No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
7b7978a
|
This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalizable region, the author's mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane--bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most c..
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
390c77b
|
Farfetching. What one is after when farfetching might be described as the intuitive perception of a moral entirety; and thus it tends to find expression not in rational symbols, but in metaphor.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
7d7cb65
|
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 a different road.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
e7ad5d7
|
never had a gift but one, to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act. I had thought that foresight lost, last year in Erhenrang, and never to be regained. A great delight it was to feel that certainty again, to know that I could steer my fortune and the world's chance like a bob-sled down the steep, dangerous hour.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
60b31ac
|
How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain ploughland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it'..
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
d72cbef
|
that silent vastness of fire and ice that said in enormous letters of black and white DEATH, DEATH, written right across a continent. The sledge pulled like a feather, and we laughed with joy.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
93c6a4f
|
The unexpected is what makes life possible," he said." --
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
272b59f
|
The word power has two different meanings. There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge. And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others. Ged was offered both kinds of power. Tenar was offered only one. Heroic fantasy descends to us from an archaic world. I hadn't yet thought much about that archaism. My story took place in the old hiera..
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
ec92a9a
|
In The Tombs of Atuan, the Old Powers, the Nameless Ones, appear as mysterious, ominous, and yet inactive. Arha/Tenar is their priestess, the greatest of all priestesses, whom the Godking himself is supposed to obey: But what is her realm? A prison in the desert. Women guarded by eunuchs. Ancient tombstones, a half-ruined temple, an empty throne. A fearful underground labyrinth where prisoners are left to die of starvation and thirst, where..
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
ee218db
|
Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance.
|
|
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |