Le Verbe Voir Quotes

Power sits uneasily on those one has grown up with. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Spy. ~ John Le Carre

Offering
I made a poem going
to sleep last night, woke
in sunlight, it was clean forgotten.
If it was any good, gods
of the great darkness
where sleep goes and farther
death goes, you not named,
then as true offering
accept it. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Real lives have no end. Real books have no end. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

I'm old to be raising a child. And she ... She obeys me, but only because she wants to."
"It's the only justification for obedience," Ged observed. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that. ~ John Le Carre

He is the earth and sunlight, the leaves of trees, the eagle's flight. He is alive. And all who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Believe that sometimes choices in life aren't always what we WANT. But sometimes, they're what we NEED ~ Kathryn Le Veque

There is no more subversive act than the act of writing from a woman's experience of life using a woman's judgment.
"Prospects for Women in Writing" 1986 ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

[W]hen habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a "fish in water": it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted could, to make sure that I am well understood, explicate Pascal's formula: the world encompasses me (me comprend) but I comprehend it (je le comprends) precisely because it comprises me. It is because this world has produced me, because it has produced the categories of thought that I apply to it, that it appears to me as self-evident. ~ Pierre Bourdieu

My proudest moments are beating Ferrari for the World Championship in 1965, and working with Ford to win Le Mans in 1966 and 1967. ~ Carroll Shelby

To lose time in the manufacture of cut-and-dried constitutions is, in consequence, a puerile task, the useless labour of an ignorant rhetorician. Necessity and time undertake the charge of elaborating constitutions when we are wise enough to allow these two factors to act ~ Gustave Le Bon

A 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

And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You cannot speak on behalf of a nation when you have no mandate to do so. ~ Jean-Marie Le Pen

Leamas saw. He saw the long road outside
Rotterdam, the long straight road beside the
dunes, and the stream of refugees moving
along it; saw the little aeroplane miles away,
the procession stop and look towards it; and
the plane coming in, nearly over the dunes;
saw the chaos, the meaningless hell, as the
bombs hit the road.
"I can't talk like this, Control," Leamas
said at last. "What do you want me to do? ~ John Le Carre

I met them in Minneapolis when the Society hosted a brunch for this year's winners and gave us these oversized checks they had us pose with. The picture made the front page of the Le Sueur News Herald.
It was really embarrassing because I'm smiling with my eyes shut.
And if that wasn't bad enough, Russ made a huge copy of the photo, replacing the background with a highway scene and the check I was holding with a sign that said NEED RIDE TO STAR TREK CONVENTION. ~ Brian Malloy

Ashe was typical of that stratum of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat. ~ John Le Carre

In the West, for example, people believe they must 'pursue happiness' as if it were some kind of a flighty bird that is always out of reach. In the East, we believe we are born with happiness and one of life's important takes, my mother told me, is to protect it. ~ Le Ly Hayslip

Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The life of a female politician makes it hard to combine personal life and work, but I think it is almost a patriotic duty to have children. ~ Marion Marechal-Le Pen

I honestly do wonder, without wishing to be morbid, how I reached this present pass. So far as I can ever remember of my youth, I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest toward my... goal... Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole of life in terms of conspiracy... These people terrify me, but I am one of them. If they stab me in the back, then at least that is the judgement of my peers. ~ John Le Carre

I forgot, being too interested myself, that he's a king, and does not see things rationally, but as a king. All I've told him means to him simply that his power is threatened, his kingdom is a dust mote in space, his kingship is a joke to men who rule a hundred worlds. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

human beings, cans of living preserves ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

We know of no other event like it in the history of the world, except perhaps the first confrontation in Europe between the neolithic peoples who came from the East and the primitive hunters. But no witness ever wrote of that great drama. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian - that is, a creature acting by instinct. ~ Gustave Le Bon

We colonise them, Your Graces, we corrupt them, we exploit them, we bomb them, sack their cities, ignore their culture, and confound them with the infinite variety of our religious sects. We are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils as well - the stink of the round-eye is abhorrent to them and we're too thick even to know it. Yet when we have done our worst, and more than our worst, my sons, we have barely scratched the surface of the Asian smile." Other ~ John Le Carre

If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that. ~ J M G Le Clezio

How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

But the human being likes to be challenged, seeks freedom in adversity. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He 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

We are not racists or extremists in the Front National. We are people who love our country. ~ Marion Marechal-Le Pen