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Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes - Page 16

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Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.

Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Artist, Years, Indifference
Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.233, Grove Press

Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?

Ursula K. Le Guin
Soul, Doe, Hell
Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “The Dispossessed”, p.151, Hachette UK

It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Grandfather, Criminals, Noses
Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.103, Penguin

True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blonde Hero-really look-and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Life, Religious, Real
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.77, Ultramarine Publishing

Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?

Ursula K. Le Guin
Heart, Fire, Desire
Ursula K. Le Guin (2008). “Lavinia”, p.66, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors besides battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fanstasy is good at thinking about those other ways.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Real, War, Thinking

What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up

Ursula K. Le Guin
Young, Organize, Bottom

Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Suffering, Warning, Danger
"The Dispossessed". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974.

The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Profitable
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Farthest Shore”, p.69, Simon and Schuster

Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Empathy, Apathy, Fiction
Ursula K. Le Guin (2015). “Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story”, p.96, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Passion, Giving, Way
Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.70, Penguin

Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Drama, Doors, Perception
"Ursula K. Le Guin, The Art of Fiction No. 221". Interview with John Wray, www.theparisreview.org. Fall 2013.

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Brain, Doe, Chemicals
Ursula K Le Guin (2014). “The Lathe of Heaven”, p.41, Diversion Books

Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I'm sorry. When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Sorry, Wish, Faces
Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “Very Far Away from Anywhere Else”, p.18, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

At the pit's bottom is no anger.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Anger, Pits, Bottom
Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.62, Penguin

Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Art, Dull, Entertainment
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.232, Ultramarine Publishing

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Use, Half, Whole
Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, p.11, Shambhala Publications

Do remember, though, that unless you're a playwright, the result [dialogue] isn't what you want; it's only an element of what you want. Actors embody and re-create the words of drama. In fiction, a tremendous amount of story and character may be given through the dialogue, but the story-world and its people have to be created by the storyteller. If there's nothing in it but disembodied voices, too much is missing.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Drama, Writing, Character

There are dance artists, painting artists and writing artists. Authors are writing artists. You can practice art in whatever medium you choose, and words are mine.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Art, Writing, Practice

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.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Pain, Choices, Missing

Certainly the effort to remain unchanged, young, when the body gives so impressive a signal of change as the menopause, is gallant; but it is a stupid, self-sacrificial gallantry, better befitting a boy of twenty than a woman of forty-five or fifty. Let the athletes die young and laurel-crowned. Let the soldiers earn the Purple Hearts. Let women die old, white-crowned, with human hearts.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Stupid, Athlete, Heart
Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.5, Grove Press

Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Faith, Men, Legends
Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.46, Penguin

In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Men, Interesting, Drawbacks

What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Psychosis, Needs, Alive
Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.105, Simon and Schuster

My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Reading, Aunt, Said

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