Ursula O'farrell Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I'm not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely! — 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

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

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