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Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes - Page 14

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All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.

All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Ocean, Humility, Glimpse
Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.295, Simon and Schuster

To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don't realize that. And you can't write unless you read.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Jobs, Writing, Thinking

No matter how successful, beloved, influential her work was, when a woman author dies, nine times out of ten, she gets dropped from the lists, the courses, the anthologies, while the men get kept. ... If she had the nerve to have children, her chances of getting dropped are higher still. ... So if you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Suicide, Children, Taken
"Prospects for Women in Writing" (speech), Portland, Me., Sept. 1986

The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Law, Evolution, Strongest
Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “The Dispossessed”, p.97, Hachette UK

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.... Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.... Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Dream, Lying, Sleep
Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.8, Penguin

She'll die.' 'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Alive, Dies, Consequence
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Farthest Shore”, p.82, Simon and Schuster

But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord." "It might to keep it open.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Men, Doors, Might
Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.36, Penguin

In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Fear, Loss, Force
Ursula K. Le Guin (2008). “Lavinia”, p.177, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Do you know how to read?" "No. It is one of the black arts." He nodded. "But a useful one," he said.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Art, Black, Said
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Tombs of Atuan”, p.136, Simon and Schuster

Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them, all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal?-What is it but death-death without rebirth?

Ursula K. Le Guin
Stars, Flower, Light
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Farthest Shore”, p.124, Simon and Schuster

Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Art, Real, Mean
"The Magician". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. December 17, 2005.

Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Lying, Gaps, Twisted
Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume--Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions”, p.283, Macmillan

You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Believe, Play, People
Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “The Lathe Of Heaven”, p.74, Hachette UK

It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Pain, Believe, Reality

You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Vices, Virtue, Term

By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Law, Choices, Betrayed
Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Telling”, p.139, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Song, Mind, Tunes

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

Ursula K. Le Guin
Light, Shadow, Doe
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “A Wizard of Earthsea”, p.27, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Light, Ideas, Done
Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “The Dispossessed”, p.35, Hachette UK

She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Animal, Tanks, Common
Ursula K. Le Guin (2009). “The Dispossessed”, p.18, Harper Collins

I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Thinking, Way, Fiction
Source: www.guernicamag.com

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Meaningful, Cancer, Waiting Rooms
Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.4, Grove Press

Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Eye, Thinking, Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.116, Penguin

Very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Space, May
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Farthest Shore”, p.35, Simon and Schuster

The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Power, Achievement, Growth
Ursula K. Le Guin (1973). “The lathe of heaven”

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