01c. 1973 ADAnd I did nothing, nothing but try to hide from the horror of dying." He stopped, for saying the truth aloud was unendurable. It was not shame that stopped him, but fear, the same fear. He knew now why this tranquil life in sea and sunlight on the rafts seemed to him like an after-life or a dream, unreal. It was because he knew in his heart that reality was empty: without life or warmth or color or sound: without meaning. There were no heights or depths. All this lovely play of form and light and color on the sea and in the eyes of men, was no more than that, a playing of illusions on the shallow void.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
02c. 1973 ADAlmost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
03c. 1973 ADAs a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
05c. 1973 ADYou are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light. They could not hide you.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
06c. 1973 ADIt 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 / quote ↗
07c. 1973 AD...You have knowledge, and I have skill, and between us we have...""We have the Ring of Erreth-Akbe.""Yes, that. But I thought also of another thing between us. Call it trust... That is one of its names. It is a very great thing. Though each of us alone is weak, having that we are strong, stronger than the Powers of the Dark.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
08c. 1973 ADI think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don’t have to learn.”Vokep shook his head grimly. “It’s the kids,” he said. “Having babies. Makes ’em propertarians. They won’t let go.” He sighed. “Touch and go, brother, that’s the rule. Don’t ever let yourself be owned.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
09c. 1973 ADCOME HOME, TENAR! COME HOME!”In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face toward home. The mother waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind her, watched the tiny figure running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass beneath the trees.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
10c. 1973 ADAll that grieved me - that I was half one thing and half another and nothing wholly - was the sorrow of my childhood, but the strength and use of my life after I grew up.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
11c. 1973 ADSomewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I went on through the Sinoth Valley, through the evening of his death, into the cold country that lies beyond fear. There I found you can weep all you like, but there's no good in it.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
12c. 1973 ADIt is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
13c. 1973 ADI doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
14c. 1973 ADTo think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
15c. 1973 ADImagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
18c. 1973 ADMany people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird feeder.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
19c. 1973 ADIf women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?...I mean, men give her [a queen] power. They let her use their power. But it isn't hers, is it? It isn't because she's a woman that she's powerful, but despite it.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
20c. 1973 ADCan you walk the road your dream goes?Sometimes. Sometimes I am afraid to.Who is not....Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
21c. 1973 ADBut you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power...It must follow knowledge, and serve need.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
22c. 1973 ADNo man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
23c. 1973 ADHe never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
24c. 1973 ADOh, Hank," Susan whispered, "their wings are furry.""Oh, James," Harriet whispered, "their hands are kind.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
