Ursula K. LeGuin Quotes
Ursula K. LeGuin Quotes. Below is a collection of famous Ursula K. LeGuin quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by Ursula K. LeGuin. Share these quotations with your friends and family.
Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing -- instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
A Woman is home caring for her children! even if she can't. Trapped in this well-built trap, A Woman blames her mother for luring her into it, while ensuring that her own daughter never gets out; she recoils from the idea of sisterhood and doesn't believe women have friends, because it probably means something unnatural, and anyhow, A Woman is afraid of women. She's a male construct, and she's afraid women will deconstruct her. She's afraid of everything, because she can't change. Thighs forever thin and shining hair and shining teeth and she's my Mom, too, all seven percent of her. And she never grows old.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
The story - from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace - is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hide hole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luke Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
The 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.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself
By Ursula K. LeGuin
If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong -- not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck -- if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we'll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at least he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
When action grows unprofitable, gather information when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces what they want is control. Control over behavior power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty not knowing what comes next.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.
By Ursula K. LeGuin
Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
By Ursula K. LeGuin