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Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes - Page 11

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Living in a world that is valued only as gain, an ever-expanding world-as-frontier that has no worth of its own, no fullness of its own, you live in danger of losing your own worth to yourself. That's when you begin to

Living in a world that is valued only as gain, an ever-expanding world-as-frontier that has no worth of its own, no fullness of its own, you live in danger of losing your own worth to yourself. That's when you begin to listen to the voices from the other side, and to ask questions of failure and the dark.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Dark, Voice, World
Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, p.31, Shambhala Publications

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.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Hate, Mean, Expression
Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.22, Penguin

Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Book, Writing
"A Message About Messages". Personal website, www.ursulakleguin.com.

There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Dream, Eye, Mind
Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.32, Grove Press

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Childhood, Firsts, Steps
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Farthest Shore”, p.11, Simon and Schuster

It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Dark, Light, Hands
Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.182, Penguin

Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Depressing, Logical, Extremes

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Artist, Said, Deals
Ursula K. Le Guin (2018). “Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.62, Hachette UK

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Wall, Real
Ursula K. Le Guin (2009). “The Dispossessed”, p.6, Harper Collins

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing, Done, Noise

In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Kids, Writing, Mean

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
Artist, Novelists, Doe
Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.10, Penguin

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Choices Made, Survival, Favors
Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.18, Grove Press

What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing, Practice, Voice
Ursula K. Le Guin (2015). “Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story”, p.100, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

there are times when you have to speak because silence is betrayal.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Betrayal, Silence, Speak

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Intelligent, Cerebral
Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.280, Grove Press

It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done?

Ursula K. Le Guin
Eye, Science, Technology
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.219, Ultramarine Publishing

It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Stars, Children, Distance
"Transcript for the Piece Audio version of A Wizard of Earthsea: A Big Read Documentary". www.prx.org.

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Destiny, Men, Empathy
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.43, Ultramarine Publishing

Love is the true condition of human life.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Love Is, Human Life, Humans

The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography. For the ultimate selling job on ultimate violence one must read those works of fiction issued by our government as manuals of civil defense, in which you learn that there's nothing to be afraid of if you've stockpiled lots of dried fruit.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Jobs, Business, Acceptance

Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Poison, Excess, Body

It win be a device that will permit communication without any time interval between two points in space. The device will not transmit messages, of course; simultaneity is identity. But to our perceptions, that simultaneity will function as a transmission, a sending. So we will be able to use it to talk between worlds, without the long waiting for the message to go and the reply to return that electromagnetic impulses require. It is really a very simple matter. Like a kind of telephone.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Communication, Winning, Simple

I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing, Doors, Fiction

Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.

Ursula K. Le Guin
War, Hero, Lavinia
Ursula K. Le Guin (2008). “Lavinia”, p.132, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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