1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
4747
4748
4749
4750
4751
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 |
| 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.. | human murder slave trust victim | 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. | politics racism rage | 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 | ||
| e72ffe4 | If you play against your own side you'll lose the whole game. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 1314fc4 | This is morally problematic when personal decision is confused with personal opinion. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| dd04eff | I am not sure who I am," I said cautiously. "Many people never are," she said. "But it doesn't matter, you know. If for one moment of your whole life you know that you are, then that's your life, that moment, that's unnua, that's all. In a short life I saw my mother's face, like the sun. So I'm here. In a long life I went there and there and there; but I dug in the garden, the root of a weed came up in my hand, so I am unnua. When you get o.. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 8f0faf5 | The fact that the Hegnish have absolutely no interest in any people except themselves can also cause offense, or even rage. Foreigners exist. That is all the Hegnish know about them, and all they care to know. They are too polite to say that it is a pity that foreigners exist, but if they had to think about it, they would think so. | foreigners nationalism xenophobia | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 3b9f138 | I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for--so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house? | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| a4765cb | To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here "all roads to Mishnory". To be sure, if you turn back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitable to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road." | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 27ff55b | The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don't know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It's occupied by living. An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome. But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with .. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| e9455da | In the big, crowded, noisy room where golden suns swam on the walls and the years and Years were told on golden dials, he searched for the alien, the stranger, his wife. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| a5d6552 | Ve sonra, eger bana ihtiyacin olursa, beni cagir. Gelirim. Beni cagirirsan, mezarimdan bile cikar gelirim Tenar ! Ama seninle kalamam. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 2de9fd9 | I found an entry for the Beidr, of the Unon Plane, an aggressive and enterprising people with highly advanced material technologies, who have been in trouble more than once with the Interplanary Agency for interfering on other planes. The tourist guidebook gives them the symbols that mean "of special interest to engineers, computer programmers, and systems analysts.")" | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| bea6450 | Old Age Is Not for the Young. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| c6dab6b | I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| f6f22c7 | Akilliya soru gerekmez; aptal ise bosuna sorar." -38" | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| acc38be | Wakeful Islanded Snow and silence in the streets. Winter in the bone. In silent houses people sleep. each one alone. Self-islanded by thought and dream the solitary soul forgets the deepest depth, the earth that joins us all. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 3f8d1ad | He was putting on his old clothes, and as he pulled the shirt over his head he saw the doctor stuff the blue and yellow "sleeping clothes" into the "trash" bin. Shevek puased, the collar still over his nose. He emerged fully, knelt, and opened the bin. It was empty. "The clothes are burned?" Oh, those are cheap pajamas, service issue- wear 'em and throw 'em away, it costs less than cleaning." "It costs less," Shevek repeated meditatively... | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 0363817 | put it this way: fiction--writing it, reading it--is an act of the imagination. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| c210198 | As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep. I was not sleepy, yet. I would go east to the Fastnesses, and gather information from the Foretellers, perhaps. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 9965794 | 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 the dark. | inspirational | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 0af1910 | It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 77c868a | No matter how humble the spirit it's offered in, a sermon is an act of aggression. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| f15d2c2 | Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors beside battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing right do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fantasy is good at thinking about these other ways. Could we assume, for a change, that it does so?" (p. 7)" | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 67f0333 | I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward. Without mortality to purchase it, how can we have the consciousness of eternity? I think the price is worth paying. | death eternity grief | Ursula K. Le Guin | |
| 717d9a8 | When there's no social pressure behind it, respectful behavior becomes a decision, an individual choice. | Ursula K. Le Guin | ||
| 3f451dc | Cultural shock was nothing much compared to the biological shock I suffered as a human male among human beings who were, five-sixths of the time, hermaphroditic neuters. | Ursula K. Le Guin |