“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
Ursula K. Le Guin2 likes
“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
“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.”
“You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?”
“If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid.”
“Hate's not functional; why are we taught it?”
“I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.”
“In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.”
“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.”
“I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.”
“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”
“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.”
“She'll die.' 'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.”
“Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.”
“Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.”
“For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.”
“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
“I wish we could stop using the word belief in matters of fact, leaving it where it belongs, in matters of religious faith and secular hope. I believe we'd avoid a lot of unnecessary pain if we did so.”
“Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.”
“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
“Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom...and that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, when they need it, and that's always.”
“If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.”
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
“Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.”
“I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.”
“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive”
“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.”
“They mingle their life with the world, they mix their mind up with the world. Ordinary people look after them. Wise souls are children.”
“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.”
“Truth is a matter of the imagination.”
“A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.”
“Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.”
“He said after a little while, 'I see why you say that only men do evil, I think. Even sharks are innocent, they kill because they must.' 'That is why nothing can resist us. Only one thing in the worl can resist an evil-hearted man. And that is another man. In our shame is our glory. Only our spirit, which is capable of evil, is capable of overcoming it.”
“So wise souls, leaving self behind move forward, and setting self aside stay centered. Why let the self go? To keep what the soul needs.”
“I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.”
“They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned.”
“They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
“...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well.”
“I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.”
“To light a candle is to cast a shadow...”
“I write with all my heart”
“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.”
“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.... None of this is spare time. I can't spare it. ... I have no time to spare.”
“I went to the springs while the sun was still up, and sitting on a rocky outcrop above the cave mouth I watched the light grow reddish across the misty pools, and listened to the troubled voice of the water. After a while I moved farther up the hill, where I could hear birds singing near and far in the silence of the trees. The presence of the trees was very strong...The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.”
“What is sacredness? What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful. So the Telling tries to find the truth in events or the pain, or the beauty? No need to try to find it, said Unroy. The sacredness is there. In the truth, the pain, the beauty. So that the telling of it is sacred.”
“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.”