1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3265
3266
3267
3268
3269
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 79aa403 | I want to say to the literature teacher who remains wilfully, even boastfully ignorant of a major element of contemporary fiction: you are incompetent to teach or judge your subject. Readers and students who do know the field, meanwhile, have every right to challenge your ignorant prejudice. Rise, undergraduates of the English departments! You have nothing to lose but your A on the midterm! | critics fantasy | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| c5bd091 | I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading." -- "On Despising Genres," essay" | science-fiction | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 8a7424a | I've been looking only at what's to be done next and forgetting why we're doing it. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| cf99bdf | All who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You lost death, you lost life, in order to save yourself. Yourself! Your immortal self! What is it? Who are you?" "I am myself. My body will not decay and die-" "A living body suffers pain, Cob; a living body grows old; it dies. Death is the price we pay for our life and for all life." "I do not pay it! I can.. | earthsea heaven life self the-farthest-shore | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 051271e | The room smelled of books, that subtle smell which to some is stuffy and to others intoxicating, and it was silent. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 08ec24a | We are all contingent. Resentment is foolish and ungenerous, and even anger is inadequate. I am a fleck of light on the surface of the sea, a glint of light from the evening star. I live in awe. If I never lived at all, yet I am a silent wing on the wind, a bodiless voice in the forest of Albunea. I speak, but all I can say is: Go, go on. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 6e81a65 | But I can't say that gratitude was my motive for infringing on the Law of Cultural Embargo. I was not paying my debt to him. Such debts remain owing. Estraven and I had simply arrived at the point where we shared whatever we had that was worth sharing. | sharing | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 07c5078 | It exists," Shevek said, spreading out his hands. "It's real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can't pretend that it doesn't exist, or will ever cease to exist. 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 existence. We can't prevent suff.. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| bd762f3 | WE stowed the wheels, uncapped the sledge-runners, put on our sis, and took off -- down, north, onward, into that silent vastness of fire an 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 | ||
| 4f5d061 | The art of one's own time tends to be formidable . . . because we have to learn how and where to take hold of it, what response is being asked of us, before we can get involved. It's truly new, and therefore truly a bit frightening. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 13db5a6 | 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 do.... | power responsibility | Ursula K Le Guin | |
| eddeec1 | Ursula K. Le Guin urges authors to remember why they do what they do. Her argument is that writing is an form of art rather than a commodity. | books writing | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 4888206 | Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. | writing | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 49189e5 | I bid your voice be dumb until the day you find a word worth speaking. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| b33ec00 | The presence of females was oppressive to them all. It seemed to them that lately the world was full of girls. Everywhere they looked, waking or asleep, they saw giris. They had all tried copulating with girls; some of them in despair had also tried not copulating with girls. It made no difference. The girls were there. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 600063b | I think... most women marry to get their freedom." "Then they want less than I do. There's something inside me, in my heart, a brightness and a heaviness, how can I describe it? Something that exists and does not yet exist, which is mine to carry, and not mine to give up to any man." | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 168fada | She the stranger, the foreigner, of alien blood and mind, did not share his power or his conscience or his knowledge or his exile. She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their great difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that in joining them together, freed them. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| f93bfe4 | With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city. Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave m.. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| e355ddf | He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate? she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed .. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| c0199d3 | The offer of a generous spirit is not one to refuse lightly. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 1bae83d | 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. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| a0b1920 | Boris Pasternak said that poetry makes itself from the relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 4f6c836 | The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity," said a tall, soft-eyed girl. "Love is the true condition of human life." Bedap shook his head. "No. Shev's right," he said. "Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not." | pain | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 57fd208 | An Odonian's goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| f9dc277 | In innocence there is no strength against evil [...] but there is strength in it for good. | innocence strength | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| ad63909 | Tenar, I go where I am sent. I follow my calling. It has not yet let me stay in any land for long. Do you see that? I do what I must do. Where I go, I must go alone. So long as you need me, I'll be with you in Havnor. And if you ever need me again, call me. I will come. I would come from my grave if you called me, Tenar! But I cannot stay with you. | powerful romantic | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 79b29f0 | Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn't know how to sell the product. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| b7936d6 | The Sun Going South In late sunshine I wander troubled. Restless I wander in autumn sunlight. Too many changes, partings, and deaths. Doors have closed that were always open. Trees that held the sky up are cut down. So much that I alone remember! This creek runs dry among its stones. Souls of the dead, come drink this water! Come into this side valley with me, | end troubled ursula-k-le-guin | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 15c7e34 | 31 against war Weapons are unhappy tools, not chosen by thoughtful people, to be used only when there is no choice, and with a calm, still mind, without enjoyment. To enjoy using weapons is to enjoy killing people, | lao tzu trans ursula k le guin | ||
| 867a299 | To light a candle is to cast a shadow . . . | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 16bc00a | They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned. | science | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 1e7977b | You have great power inborn in you, and you used that power wrongly, to work a spell over which you had no control, not knowing how that spell affects the balance of light and dark, life and death, good and evil. And you were moved to do this by pride and by hate. Is it any wonder the result was ruin? You summoned a spirit from the dead, but with it came one of the Powers of unlife. Uncalled it came from a place where there are no names. Ev.. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 204274e | Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 93b8b81 | And so, because he won't let himself be hurt, he does wrong to those he loves best. And then he sees that, and after all, it hurts him. | self-protection | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 7f860d1 | To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game...speak the truth and hear the truth. | science-fiction | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 619dec2 | cats have no guilt and very little shame. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| fb882a3 | There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 988e496 | There was room for them. A great deal of Italy, back then, was forest. Where man goes, trees die; or, to paraphrase Tacitus, we make a desert and call it progress. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 5673132 | Page 15, paperback version by Virago Press 1997: ... Let me ask you this, Mr Ai: do you know, by your own experience, what patriotism is?" 'No', I said, shaken by the force of the intese personality suddenly turning itself wholly upon me. 'I don't think I do. If by patriotism you don't mean the love of one`s homeland, for that I do know.' 'No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressio.. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| b23795f | Kardes bile rahatlatamaz insani kotu saatte, karanlikta, duvarin dibinde. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 2677d12 | Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 930b06a | He was clearly aware of only one thing, his own total isolation. The world had fallen out from under him, and he was left alone. To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 5053550 | Actually, I don't exactly have expectations. I have hopes, and fears. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| fa3a9a7 | How It Seems To Me In the vast abyss before time, self is not, and soul commingles with mist, and rock, and light. In time, soul brings the misty self to be. Then slow time hardens self to stone while ever lightening the soul, till soul can loose its hold of self and both are free and can return to vastness and dissolve in light, the long light after time. | Ursula K. Le Guin |