01c. 1973 ADThe creative adult is the child who survived after the world tried killing them, making them grown up. The creative adult is the child who survived the blandness of schooling, the unhelpful words of bad teachers, and the nay-saying ways of the world. The creative adult is in essence simply that, a child.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
02c. 1973 ADWhile 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 / quote ↗
03c. 1973 ADFiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
04c. 1973 ADThe First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. 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.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
05c. 1973 ADI suspect that the distinction between a maternal and a paternal instinct is scarcely worth making; the parental instinct, the wish to protect, to further, is not a sex-linked characteristic…Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
06c. 1973 ADThe part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren’t about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
08c. 1973 ADSuffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of its existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering - unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
09c. 1973 ADWe are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
10c. 1973 ADOdo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
11c. 1973 ADHe recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his "cellular function." the analogic term for the individual's individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength. That was a central idea of Odo's Analogy. That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; just the contrary. With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and the individual became clear. Sacrifice mught be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice -- the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mindUrsula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
13c. 1973 ADBut you're so strong. I wish I were strong. I just like eating.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
14c. 1973 ADTo see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
15c. 1973 ADWhy are my sons followed thus by darkness?'...'Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
17c. 1973 ADWhen I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. 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. Or wonder who, after all, you are.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
19c. 1973 ADWhat was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we have is here, now.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
20c. 1973 ADWithout language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
22c. 1973 ADThere's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
23c. 1973 ADCritics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it - because they're afraid of it. They're afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they'll have to redefine what literature is. And they're too damned lazy to do it.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
24c. 1973 ADWords are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify itUrsula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
