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Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes - Page 12

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To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power

To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Women, Order, Law
Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.11, Grove Press

The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Character, Fiction, Granted

Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Telling The Truth, Distrust
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.158, Ultramarine Publishing

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
War, House, Cooking

If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Beautiful, Wisdom, Jobs

See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Loneliness, Solitude, Persons
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.199, Ultramarine Publishing

We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Dark, Thinking, Night
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.11, Ultramarine Publishing

If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Sea, Doe, Want

Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Hands, Two Sides, Life And Death
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Farthest Shore”, p.69, Simon and Schuster

Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.

Ursula K. Le Guin
God, Voice, Political

Manipulated, one manipulates others.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Manipulate
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Other Wind”, p.78, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Men, Exception
Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “The Dispossessed”, p.27, Hachette UK

To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Rocks, Rivers, Choices
Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.283, Simon and Schuster

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Grateful, Revolution
Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.107, Grove Press

A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Animal, Machines, Intention
"The Lathe of Heaven". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971.

But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Needs, Enough
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “A Wizard of Earthsea”, p.10, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Wise, Eye, Animal
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “A Wizard of Earthsea”, p.98, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Peace, Hurt, Law

There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Cutting, Soul, Enemy

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Fiction, Science Fiction

If you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you're writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn't flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Art, Motivation, Mean
"Author Talk". Interview, www.teenreads.com. September 2006.

Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind's reach and made a whole again. He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, waisted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Night, Years, Long

I know that nobody who hasn't been in battle or under attack can know what war is. But even in terms of being safe at home, it's also true that many Americans who think they know what being at war is, don't. Including, of course, George W. Bush and his people. They don't have a clue.

Ursula K. Le Guin
War, Home, Thinking
Source: www.guernicamag.com

And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Rocks, Fog, Sides
Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “Very Far Away from Anywhere Else”, p.36, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Summer, Spring, Heart
Ursula K. Le Guin (2009). “Powers”, p.74, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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