The Guin Saga Quotes

[Rinda] often worried how she might make the coward she saw [in Remus] into a brave warrior, and someday, a king -- a task which she felt was her responsibility. Rinda had not yet realized that sometimes courage is the same thing as folly and that sometimes a skepticism bordering on her blindness to her brother's strengths was a result of her own sensitivity. ~ Kaoru Kurimoto

I say we have no time for debate. Indeed, we have no need for it, since the decision has been made for us. We must fight. There is no other path! ~ Kaoru Kurimoto

A weapon is merely a weapon, nothing more. What matters is how you use it. ~ Kaoru Kurimoto

Ever since you and I were boys of fifteen, I have been in countless battles, from skirmishes to giant wars that determined the fate of nations; if there is one thing I have learned from all that experience, Garanth, it is that battles are alive. Battles are living things. As with beasts, you must try to know them, you must handle them with care and some love, but you must never take your eyes off them, or they will go for your throat. Battles are wild beasts that can never be truly tamed, Garanth. You need both a whip and meat if you want them to turn on your foes and not yourself. The general . . . does not understand this. ~ Kaoru Kurimoto

For a while, my self-control and my power of reason quailed to uselessness. ~ Kaoru Kurimoto

I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination. I ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The child stared at her or at nothing, trying to breathe, and trying again to breathe, and trying again to breathe. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Most best-sellers are written for readers who are willing to be passive consumers. The blurbs on their covers often highlight the coercive, aggressive power of the text - compulsive page-turner, gut-wrenching, jolting, mind-searing, heart-stopping - what is this, electroshock torture? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Many sci-fi authors, we know, are as clever and tricky as so many Coyotes. Ms. Le Guin, though, has matured from the vividness and imagination she had from the beginning into wisdom and a clearsightedness that reaches past sympathy. ~ Tom Shippey

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it; it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

you speak the truth. Much will be lost. I know it. The lesser knowledge must be given to gain the greater. And not once only. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I never knew anybody ... who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Well, we think that time 'passes,' flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self - ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality, the truth which I recognise in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness - that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

[Genre is] like working in any form - in poetry, for example. When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always - I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me - is that the form leads you to what you want to say. It is wonderful and mysterious. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I thought I was inventing my own lot of imaginary aliens​, and I was only describing the Senoi. It is not only th Captain Davidsons who can be found in the unconscious, if one looks. The quiet people who do not kill each other are there, too. It seems that a great deal is there, the things we most fear (and therefore deny), the things we most need (and therefore deny). I wonder, couldn't we start listening to our dreams, and our children dreams? "Where did you fall to, and what did you discover? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women ... women tend to eat less ... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing ... ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like
what's going on
what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming another third of it spent in telling lies. [Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness] ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

But 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

Wakeful

Islanded

Snow and silence in the streets.
Winter in the bone.
In silent houses people sleep.
each one alone.
Self-islanded by thought and dream
the solitary soul
forgets the deepest depth, the earth
that joins us all. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

As for the doctor's mind, though intelligent and certainly well-meaning, it was a jumble of intellectual artifacts even more confusing than all the gadgets, appliances, and coneniences that filled the ship. These latter Shevek found entertaining; everything was so lavish, stylish, and inventive; but the furniture of Kimoe's intellect he did not find so comfortable. Kimoe's ideas never seemed to be able to go in a straight line; they had to walk around this and avoid that. There were walls around all his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of them, though he was perpetually hiding behind them. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

At the pit's bottom is no anger. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

To say that an Orgota government fell means, of course, only that one group of Commensals replaced another group of Commensals in the controlling offices of the Thirty-Three. Some shadows got shorter and some longer, as they say in Karhide. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Ged 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

Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes.... ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The trouble is, women have to be absolutely first class to get where third-class men get. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint, or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness. . . Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both. It ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

To deny the past is to deny the future. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I 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

He said after a little while, 'I see why you say that only men do evil, I think. Even sharks are innocent, they kill because they must.'
'That is why nothing can resist us. Only one thing in the worl can resist an evil-hearted man. And that is another man. In our shame is our glory. Only our spirit, which is capable of evil, is capable of overcoming it. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

How It Seems To Me

In the vast abyss before time, self
is not, and soul commingles
with mist, and rock, and light. In time,
soul brings the misty self to be.
Then slow time hardens self to stone
while ever lightening the soul,
till soul can loose its hold of self
and both are free and can return
to vastness and dissolve in light,
the long light after time. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Sentences aren't. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man: I am not even young. Just about the time they finally started inventing women, I started getting old. And I went right on doing it. Shamelessly. I have allowed myself to get old and haven't done one single thing about it, with a gun or anything. What ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a fury in a cage. He had no right to tease them. They knew no relation but possession. They were possessed. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The moment was gone; he saw it going. He did not try to hold on to it. He knew he was part of it, not it of him. He was in its keeping. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

But the death of a great mage, who has many times in his life walked on the dry steep hillsides of death's kingdom, is a strange matter: for the dying man goes not blindly, but surely, knowing the way. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He gave way to the fear that had come with her, the sense of the breaking of promises, the incoherence of Time. He broke. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I walk on the ground and the ground's walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world. Only ~ Ursula K. Le Guin