01c. 1973 ADI know that I am going to meet a personal variation on reality; a partial view of reality. But I know also that by that partiality, that distancing from the shared experience, it will be new: a revelation. It will be a vision, a more or less powerful or haunting dream. A space-voyage through somebody else's psychic abysses. It will fall short of tragedy, because tragedy is the truth, and truth is what the very great artists, the absolute novelists, tell. It will not be truth; but it will be imagination. Truth is best. For it encompasses tragedy and partakes of the eternal joy. But very few of us know it; the best we can do is recognize it. Imagination - to me - is the next best. For it partakes of Creation, which is one aspect of the eternal joy. All the rest is either Politics or Pedantry, or Mainstream Fiction, may it rest in peace.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
02c. 1973 ADIn this he saw that Ogion had been right: the shadow could not draw on his power, so long as he was turned against it.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
03c. 1973 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
04c. 1973 ADLet us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to "get away to"?Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane stove, five aluminum folding chairs, and a transistor radio on the inside. They arrive totally encapsulated in a secondhand reality. And then they move on to Yellowstone, and it's just the same there, all trailers and transistors. They go from park to park, but they never really go anywhere; except when one of them who thinks that even the wildlife isn't real gets chewed up by a genuine, firsthand bear.The same sort of thing seems to be happening to Elfland, lately.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
05c. 1973 ADA fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
06c. 1973 ADWhat is fantasy? On one level, of course, it is a game: a pure pretense with no ulterior motive whatever. It is one child saying to another child, “Let’s be dragons,” and then they’re dragons for an hour or two. It is escapism of the most admirable kind—the game played for the game’s sake. On another level, it is still a game, but a game played for very high stakes. Seen thus, as art, not spontaneous play, its affinity is not with daydream, but with dream. It is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational but pararational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary, not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes, which, Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. And their guides, the writers of fantasy, should take their responsibilities seriously.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
07c. 1973 ADOne of the rocks in my soulbag, a little grey rock that I had picked up on a certain day in a certain place in the hills above the river in the Silver Time, a little piece of my world, that became my world. |Every night I took it out and held it in my hand while I lay in bed waiting to sleep, thinking of the sunlight on the hills above the river, listening to the soft shushing of the ship’s systems, like a mechanical seaUrsula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
08c. 1973 ADI know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is he'll be much godlier after he's dead.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
09c. 1973 ADAm I supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After all, he's just a man ... He's about fifty years old, and he's bald. And I'll bet he has to cut his toenails too like any other man. I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is, he'll be much godlier after he's dead.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
10c. 1973 ADWould you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
11c. 1973 ADA lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their children enjoyed my books but of course they never read them, and people who make sure I know they don’t read that space-ship stuff. No, no, they read Literature—realism. Like The Help, or Fifty Shades of Grey.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
12c. 1973 ADIf one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
13c. 1973 ADThe natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
15c. 1973 ADUnder his feet he felt the hillroots going down and down into the dark, and over his head he saw the dry, far fires of the stars. Between, all things were his to order, to command. He stood at the center of the world.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
16c. 1973 ADI fear liars, and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country well. Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts long enough.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
17c. 1973 ADThe Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes. And where men worship these things and abase themselves before them, there evil breeds; there places are made in the world where darkness gathers, places given over wholly to the Ones whom we call Nameless, the ancient and holy Powers of the Earth before the Light, the powers of the dark, of ruin, of madness.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
18c. 1973 ADWe live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
19c. 1973 ADThe quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
20c. 1973 ADA forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
21c. 1973 ADWe're not outside the world... We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is their in our world?Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
22c. 1973 ADGeorge, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
23c. 1973 ADYou don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
24c. 1973 ADHe 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 / quote ↗
