Ursula K. Le Guin

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Ursula K. Le Guin (born October 21, 1929), is an American author, known mostly for writing science fiction and fantasy.

Contents 1 Sourced 1.1 Novels 1.2 Other 2 Attributed 3 External links

Sourced

Novels

• It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. "If it is not, what is?" He could not endure those remembered words.
  • Spoken by Gaverel Rocannon, Rocannon's World

• To hear, one must be silent.
  • Spoken by Ogion, A Wizard of Earthsea

• To light a candle is to cast a shadow...
  • Spoken by the Master Hand, A Wizard of Earthsea

• If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
  • The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

• When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
  • The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

• The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
  • The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

• A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.
  • The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

• To oppose something is to maintain it.
  They say here "all roads lead to Mishnory." To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk another road.
  • The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

• There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
  • The Left Hand of Darkness Chapter 5. The Domestication of Hunch (1969)

• To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.
  To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
  • The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

• Light is the left hand of darkness
  and darkness the right hand of light.
  Two are one, life and death, lying
  together like lovers in kemmer,
  like hands joined together,
  like the end and the way.
  • The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

• I haven't any strength, I haven't any character, I'm a born tool. I haven't any destiny. All I have is dreams. And now other people run them.
  • Orr, in The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

• Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
  • Haber, in The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

• The end justifies the means. But what if there never was an end? All we have is means.
  • Orr, in The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

• I guess I can't, or my subconscious can't, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you're trying to use, not my rational mind. Maybe rationally I could conceive of the human species not trying to kill each other off by nations, in fact rationally it's easier to conceive of than the motives of war. You're trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn't suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?
  • Orr, in The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

• What's wrong with changing things? Now, I wonder if this self-canceling, centerpoised personality of yours leads you to look at things defensively. I want you to try to detach yourself from yourself and try to see your own viewpoint from the outside, objectively. You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life's not a static object, after all. It's a process. There's no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life-evolution-the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy-existence itself-is essentially change.
  • Haber, in The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

• When things don't change any longer, that's the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less balance there is-and the more life...Life itself is a huge gamble against the odds, against all odds! You can't try to live safely, there's no such thing as safety. Stick your neck out of your shell, then, and live fully! It's not how you get there, but where you get to that counts. What you're afraid to accept, here, is that we're engaged in a really great experiment, you and I. We're on the brink of discovering and controlling, for the good of all mankind, a whole new force, an entire new field of antientropic energy, of the life-force, of the will to act, to do, to change!
  • Haber, in The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

Other

• Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.
  • CBC Magazine [1]

Attributed

• 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.

External links

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