01c. 1973 ADFor the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
02c. 1973 ADIt is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
03c. 1973 ADThe explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
04c. 1973 ADGed saw all these things from outside and apart, alone, and his heart was very heavy in him, though he would not admit to himself that he was sad. As night fell he still lingered in the streets, reluctant to go back to the inn. He heard a man and a girl talking together merrily as they came down the street past him towards the town square, and all at once he turned, for he knew the man's voice.He followed and caught up with the pair, coming up beside them in the late twilight lit only by distant lantern-gleams. The girl stepped back, but the man stared at him and then flung up the staff he carried, holding it between them as a barrier to ward off the threat or act of evil. And that was somewhat more than Ged could bear. His voice shook a little as he said, "I thought you would know me, Vetch."Even then Vetch hesitated for a moment."I do know you," he said, and lowered the staff and took Ged's hand and hugged him round the shoulders-" I do know you! Welcome, my friend, welcome! What a sorry greeting I gave you, as if you were a ghost coming up from behind– and I have waited for you to come, and looked for you-Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
05c. 1973 ADGed had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
06c. 1973 AD...All who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You lost death, you lost life, in order to save yourself. Yourself! Your immortal self! What is it? Who are you?""I am myself. My body will not decay and die-""A living body suffers pain, Cob; a living body grows old; it dies. Death is the price we pay for our life and for all life.""I do not pay it! I can die and in that moment live again! I cannot be killed; I am immortal. I alone am myself forever!""Who are you, then?""The Immortal One.""Say your name.""The King.""Say my name. I told it to you but a minute since. Say my name!""You are not real. You have no name. Only I exist.""You exist: without name, without form. You cannot see the light of day; you cannot see the dark. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no self. All that which you sold, that is yourself. You have given everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw your world to you, all that light and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be filled. Not all the songs of earth, not all the stars of heaven, could fill your emptiness.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
07c. 1973 ADThe Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
08c. 1973 ADAn Odonian’s goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
09c. 1973 ADIn the latter months of his own long sickness the Master Herbal had taught him much of the healer's lore, and the first lesson and the last of all that lore was this: Heal the wound and cure the illness, but let the dying spirit go.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
11c. 1973 ADAll her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
12c. 1973 ADI believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
13c. 1973 ADCollaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
14c. 1973 ADMeeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won't talk about anything except the injustice of the United States income tax structure toward people with fluctuating income, or how to breed Black Angus cows, or something.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
17c. 1973 ADThose whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. —Chuang Tse: XXIIIUrsula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
18c. 1973 ADWhat is evil?" asked the younger man. The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them both. "A web we men weave." Ged answered.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
19c. 1973 ADIn modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
20c. 1973 ADOn the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
21c. 1973 ADThey are of the dream time. I don't understand it, I can't say it in words. Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes. . . .But when the mind becomes conscious, when the rate of evolution speeds up, then you have to be careful. Careful of the world. You must learn the way. You must learn the skills, the art, the limits. A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully--as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously. Do you see? Does it mean anything to you?Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
22c. 1973 ADI'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
24c. 1973 ADThe only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite—sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women.Ursula K. Le Guin / quote ↗
