Ursula Quotes & Sayings

A man gives out, dearie. A woman takes in. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It might derail and we'll all be killed. And if we do come to Aisnar? What's Aisnar? Mere hearsay.- - "That's morbid," Kasimir said, glimpsing again the walls collapsing.- - "No, exhilarating," his friend answered. "Takes a lot of work to hold the world together, when you look at it that way. But it's worthwhile. Building up cities, holding up the roofs by an act of fidelity. Not faith. Fidelity. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Who am I? Laia muttered to her invisible audience, and they knew the answer and told it to her with one voice. She was the little girl with scabby knees, sitting on the doorstep staring down through the dirty golden haze of River Street in the heat of late summer, the six-year-old, the sixteen-year-old, the fierce, cross, dream-ridden girl, untouched, untouchable. She was herself — Ursula K. Le Guin

Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

But I liked the writing better. I could make it look beautiful. I could keep it. The spoken words just went out like the wind, and you always had to say them all over again to keep them alive. But the writing stayed, and you could learn to make it better. More beautiful. — Ursula K. Le Guin

War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to "a war against" whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the "right" side and therefore will win. Right makes might. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Our souls are old,
often used before.
The knife outlasts
the hand that holds it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

You're brave and not very bright, which is the key to success. — Ursula Vernon

His story told of the king's daughter Cassandra, who foresaw what would happen and tried to prevent the Trojans from letting the great horse into the city, but no one would listen to her: it was a curse laid on her, to see the truth and say it and not be heard. It is a curse laid on women more often than on men. Men want the truth to be theirs, their discovery and property. — Ursula K. Le Guin

They say one gets used to being a millionaire; so after a year or two a human being begins to get used to being a woman. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Well," he said slowly, "sometimes there's a passion that comes in its springtime to ill fate or death. And because it ends in its beauty, it's what the harpers sing of and the poets make stories of: the love that escapes the years ...
"All or nothing, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond? — Ursula K. Le Guin

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not. — Ursula K. Le Guin

In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Who do you think is lying to us?" Shevek demanded.
Placid, Bedap met his gaze. "Who, brother? Who but ourselves? — Ursula K. Le Guin

THIS is the story of an orgasm. Or it could be said this is the story of an orgasm that never was, and then was, and once it was, it's the story of all the ripples it set in motion. It's the reiteration of the total fecundity slam dance, Big Bang Explosion that created the world. — Sharon Weil

Jose Arcadio Buendia took his wife's words literally. He looked out the window and saw the barefoot children in the sunny garden and he had the impression that only at that instant had they begun to exist, conceived by Ursula's spell. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith. — Ursula K. Le Guin

But I can't say that gratitude was my motive for infringing on the Law of Cultural Embargo. I was not paying my debt to him. Such debts remain owing. Estraven and I had simply arrived at the point where we shared whatever we had that was worth sharing. — Ursula K. Le Guin

On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate. — Ursula K. Le Guin

On the blank leaf glued to the inner back cover I drew the double curve within the circle, and blacked the yin half of the symbol, then pushed it back to my companion. 'Do you know that sign?'
He looked at it a long time with a strange look, but he said, 'No.'
'It's found on Earth, and on Hain-Davenant, and on Chiffewar. It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.' — Ursula K. Le Guin

We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand outside things and run them that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be. — Ursula K. Le Guin

On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you? — Ursula K. Le Guin

The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be (as Nim put it) "tied down to childbearing," implies that no one is quite so thoroughly "tied down" here as women, elsewhere are likely to be
psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It is what it looks like and is called. A jail. it is not a front for something else, not a facade, not a pseudonym. It is real, the real thing, the thing behind the words. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Progress means nothing to presence. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women ... women tend to eat less ... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing ... — Ursula K. Le Guin

The body is an arrangement in spacetime, a patterning, a process; the mind is a process of the body, an organ, doing what organs do: organize. Order, pattern, connect ... an immensely flexible technology, or life strategy, which if used with skill and resourcefulness presents each of us with that most fascinating of all serials, The Story of My Life. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The question was where to start. Where to build up a solid foundation of knowledge on which you could balance ideas. It wasn't exactly a modest ambition. But what I had learned from Natalie was that you could have a very immodest ambition if you went after it methodically. — Ursula K. Le Guin

And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all. — Ursula K. Le Guin

While we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices ... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Being civilized means that one keeps one's words unrelated to one's thoughts, when necessary. — Ursula Parrott

Some acts of faith, I believe, have the power to grant us something infinitely wiser than we imagine — Ursula Hegi

Mrs. Appleyard, in contrast, was thin and sallow and when her husband was out of the apartment Ursula could hear her singing mournfully to herself in a language that she couldn't place. Something Eastern European by the sound of it. How useful Mr. Carver's Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.) And especially these days with so many refugees flooding into London. — Kate Atkinson

Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Time is not duration but intensity; time is the beat and the interval [ ... ] — Ursula K. Le Guin

But he had not brought anything. His hands were empty, as they had always been. — Ursula K. Le Guin

...you play the instrument you have. — Ursula K. Le Guin

She said it seemed like the only choices offered were to want to be what other people were, or to be what other people wanted you to be. — Ursula K. Le Guin

When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. "Do they expect students not to be anarchists?" he said. "What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up — Ursula K. Le Guin

He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work
his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy
and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else. — Ursula K. Le Guin

He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In war everybody is a prisoner. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Xerox is really good at managing documents, and we're definitely good at managing through a process. — Ursula Burns

The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Power inheres in a center. You're going to the center. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Orr was not a fast reasoner. In fact, he was not a reasoner. He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence. — Ursula K. Le Guin

What is hard is to keep alive on a world you don't belong to. — Ursula K. Le Guin

If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Given a choice, she would rather be the one who was persecuted than the one doing the persecuting
both had a terrible price to pay, but she would rather endure humiliation and fear than grow numb to what it was to be human. — Ursula Hegi

Solitude was his fate; he was trapped in his heredity. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain ploughland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name
and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country, is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession ... — Ursula K. Le Guin

Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas. — Ursula K. Le Guin

O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then. — Ursula K. Le Guin

What's wrong with pleasure, Takver? why don't you want it?"
"Nothing's wrong with it. And I do want it. Only I don't need it. And if I take what I don't need, I'll never get to what I do need. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Ronde, one a live village and the other deserted, as dead as Karnak, — Ursula K. Le Guin

Greed puts out the sun. — Ursula K. Le Guin

You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said ... 'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A perfectly happy marriage? There is no such thing. There are strong marriages that can survive problems, but happiness is such a brief condition, interrupted by difficulties and plain, boring routine. — Ursula Hegi

He knew that he was very near achieving the General Temporal Theory that the Ioti wanted so badly for their spaceflight and their prestige. He knew also that he had not achieved it and might never do so. He had never admitted either fact clearly to anyone. Before he left Anarres, he had thought the thing was in his grasp.
...
He wasn't quite sure he was ready to publish. There was something not quite right, something that needed a little refining. As he had been working ten years on the theory, it wouldn't hurt to take a little longer, to get it polished perfectly smooth. The little something not quite right kept looking wronger. A little flaw in the reasoning. A big flaw. A crack right through the foundations...The night before he left Anarres he had burned every paper he had on the General Theory. He had come to Urras with nothing. For half a year he had, in their terms, been bluffing them.

Or had he been bluffing himself? — Ursula K. Le Guin

The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn't even begin to solve. — Kate Atkinson

Ursula K. Le Guin urges authors to remember why they do what they do. Her argument is that writing is an form of art rather than a commodity. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out. Everyone rushed after it, shouting "Stop! Stop! Why did you do that?" "Becuase I am a panda," said the panda. "That's what pandas do. If you don't believe me, look in the dictionary." So they looked in the dictionary and sure enough they found Panda: Racoon-like animal of Asia. Eats shoots and leaves. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We've made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can't see them, because they're part of our thinking. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I hate the word sexy. — Ursula Andress

Darling? This is Ursula Monkton, — Neil Gaiman

A voice in the darkness said, 'You have come too far.' Arren answered it, saying, 'Only too far is far enough. — Ursula K. Le Guin

George Orr stayed in Portland because he had always lived there and because he had no reason to believe that life anywhere else would be better, or different. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

He copulated with a number of girls, but copulation was not the joy it ought to be. It was a mere relief of need, like evacuating, and he felt ashamed of it afterward because it involved another person as object. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To him a thinking man's job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect. — Ursula K. Le Guin

What will the creature made all of sea-drift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking? His — Ursula K. Le Guin

Trolls have a longstanding animosity for goats
"Who's that trip-tapping across my bridge!?"
and this led me to think that perhaps trolls are related to goats, since it seems a lot more plausible to me that your relatives would make you insane than some random hooved mammal, however ecologically destructive it might be. What if trolls evolved from goats? Or, no, better yet, what if goats evolved from trolls? Or were domesticated from trolls by human shepherds? And the trolls despise their domesticated cousins as a disgrace to the once-proud troll race, (much as I assume wolves would despise Chihuahuas if they ever gave them much thought) and eat them at every opportunity. — Ursula Vernon

Today, girls,' said Miss Renshaw, 'we shall go out into the beautiful Gardens and think about death. — Ursula Dubosarsky

Ursula Nordstrom was famous for finding artists in unlikely places. Maurice Sendak was a window designer, and she just came across one of his windows. Everyone was looking to find a talent. — Peter Sis

When you have nothing to pray for, that's when Luck hears you. If — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair ... Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I'm less concerned about whether being a good corporate citizen burnishes a company's reputation. That's just an added benefit. I believe it's a responsibility, and there is no negotiating on responsibilities. — Ursula Burns

Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side. — Ursula K. Le Guin

After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It was not in Raj Lyubov's nature to think, "What can I do?" Character and training disposed him not to interfere in other men's business. His job was to find out what they did, and his inclination was to let them go on doing it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just don't understand. And incomprehension is boredom. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists? — Ursula K. Le Guin

I prefer to save talking till I know what I'm talking about. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art. — Ursula K. Le Guin

CEOs resign when the internal dynamics of the company and the external dynamics of the company actually come together to say it is appropriate. When the internal dynamics ask you whether you have a replacement. I think the transition from CEOships have also become cartoonish. — Ursula Burns