01c. 1973 ADBut if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of the job to be done and one's ability to do it, then you might say the chief virtue of excellent artists is their modesty...But knowing your limits and going to them isn't arrogance. It's greatness of spirit.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
03c. 1973 ADIgnorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
04c. 1973 ADThe unknown...the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought...The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
05c. 1973 AD[T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
06c. 1973 ADI think we shall have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round and round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
08c. 1973 ADDo you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
09c. 1973 ADWell," 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 / quote ↗
10c. 1973 ADA man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government in earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
11c. 1973 ADIt was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
12c. 1973 ADTry to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. {...} But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
13c. 1973 ADThere's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
14c. 1973 ADBut the human being likes to be challenged, seeks freedom in adversity.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
15c. 1973 ADThe danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
16c. 1973 ADA machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
18c. 1973 ADA book won't move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. A book won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a good novel well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is a collaboration, an act of participation. No wonder not everybody is up to it.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
19c. 1973 ADThere have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
20c. 1973 ADI always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
21c. 1973 ADStories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
22c. 1973 ADWhen we know that it's a planet just like this one, only with a better climate and worse people--when we know they're all propertarians, and fight wars, and make laws, and eat while other starve, and anyhow are all getting older and having bad luck and getting rheumatic knees and corns on their toes just like people there...when we know all that, why does it still look so happy--as if life there must be happy?..."... "If you can see the whole thing," he said, "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 art is, is to see it as the moon. They way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
23c. 1973 ADYou shall not go down good twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You CAN go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
24c. 1973 ADThis was a great magic. Festin had no more performed it than has any man who in exile or danger longs for the earth and waters of his home, seeing and yearning over the doorsill of his house, the table where he has eaten, the branches outside the window of the room where he has slept. Only in dreams do any but the great Mages realize this magic of going home.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
