Le Guin, Ursula K.
American writer, born
1929.
Links:
http://www.levity.com/corduroy/leguin.htm
http://hem.passagen.se/peson42/lgw/
http://www.ocelotfactory.com/leguin/
http://www.wwno.com/sf&f/author/leguin/leguin.htm
http://www.feministsf.org/femsf/authors/leguin/
Quotations:
1. "As great
scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the
imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope."
2. “Do not speak of what men deserve. For we each of us
deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead
Kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger.
Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you
reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment,
no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, of earning,
and you will begin to be able to think.”
3. “I certainly wasn't
happy. Happiness
has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep,
and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.”
4. “I doubt that the
imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he
would grow up to be an eggplant.”
5. “If you can see a thing
whole, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up, a
world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired,
you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful
the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is,
is from the vantage point of death.”
6. “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.”
7. "It had never occurred to me before that music and
thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of
thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music."
8. “It is good to have an
end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.”
9. "Love just doesn't
sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time,
made new."
10. “The future has
become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an
inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible
being among other beings in this sacred world here
and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.”
11. “The important thing is not the
finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel
of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this
machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it, because
your heart would not have been purified by the long quest.”
12. “The only thing that makes life
possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”
13. “The story -
from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace - is one of the basic tools invented by
the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great
societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did
not tell stories.”
14. “To oppose something is to maintain
it.”
15. "True myth 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 isalways its message. You must change your
life."
16. “What sane person could live in
this world and not be crazy?”
17. ”When we were children, we used to
think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow
up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.”
18. “You can't crush ideas by
suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.”
19. “You must not change one thing, one
pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow that
act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A Wizard's power of changing and
summoning can shake a balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power ... To
light a candle is to cast a shadow.”
20. "You thought, as a boy, that a
mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we
all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge
widens, ever the way he can follow grows
narrower: until at last he chooses othing, but does only and
wholly what he must do."
Last update: February 28th, 2002.