Ursula Nordstrom Quotes

The creative artist is the one wanting to make order out of chaos. The rest of us just accept disorder -if we even recognize it- and get a bang out of our five beautiful senses, if we're lucky. ~ Ursula Nordstrom

I never want to forget that if Lewis Carroll had asked me whether or not he should bother writing about a little girl named Alice who fell asleep and dreamed that she had a lot of adventures down a rabbit hole, it would not have sounded awfully tempting to any editor. ~ Ursula Nordstrom

Some mediocre ladies in influential positions are usually embarrassed by an unusual book and so prefer the old familiar stuff which doesn't embarrass them and also doesn't give the child one slight inkling of beauty and reality. This is most discouraging to a creative writer, like you, and also to a hardworking and devoted editor like me. I love most of my editor colleagues but I must confess that I get a little depressed and sad when some of their neat little items about a little girl in old Newburyport during the War of 1812 gets [sic] adopted by a Reading Circle. ~ Leonard S. Marcus

Ursula Nordstrom was famous for finding artists in unlikely places. Maurice Sendak was a window designer, and she just came across one of his windows. Everyone was looking to find a talent. ~ Peter Sis

If the rowan's roots are shallow, it bears no crown. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

People who sleep only two or three hours in the twenty-four are always geniuses. The ones you hear about, anyway. Never mind if the ones you don't hear about are dolts. Insomnia is genius. It must be. Think of all the work you could do the thoughts you could think, the books you could read, the love you could make, while the dull clods lie snoring. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

are all contingent. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He was putting on his old clothes, and as he pulled the shirt over his head he saw the doctor stuff the blue and yellow "sleeping clothes" into the "trash" bin. Shevek puased, the collar still over his nose. He emerged fully, knelt, and opened the bin. It was empty.
"The clothes are burned?"
Oh, those are cheap pajamas, service issue- wear 'em and throw 'em away, it costs less than cleaning."
"It costs less," Shevek repeated meditatively. He sad the words the way a paleontontologist looks at a fossil, the fossil that date a whole stratum. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Everything is a piece of me, a moment of my life. ~ Ursula Andress

There's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Tenar, I go where I am sent. I follow my calling. It has not yet let me stay in any land for long. Do you see that? I do what I must do. Where I go, I must go alone. So long as you need me, I'll be with you in Havnor. And if you ever need me again, call me. I will come. I would come from my grave if you called me, Tenar! But I cannot stay with you. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It was the most beautiful view Shevek had ever seen. The tenderness and vitality of the colors, the mixture of rectilinear human design and powerful, proliferate natural contours, the variety and harmony of the elements, gave an impression of complex wholeness such as he had never seen, except, perhaps, foreshadowed on a small scale in certain serene and thoughtful human faces. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I never had a gift but one, to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

SCIENCE FICTION IS OFTEN DESCRIBED, AND EVEN DEFINED, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.

This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as "escapist," but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because "it's so depressing. ~ 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

I'm a black lady from the Lower East Side of New York. Not a lot intimidates me. ~ Ursula Burns

I fell from the sky. I'm a parachutist, and I missed my mark. ~ Ursula Andress

Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number - Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysis, every now and then. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The best way to change it is to do it. Right? And then after a while you become it, and it's easy. ~ Ursula Burns

Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains... and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. "You call that organization?" he had inquired. "You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency--a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?" This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerrillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. "But that only works when the people think they're fighting for something of their own--you know, their homes, or some notion or other," the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the Army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto. ~ 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

George Orr stayed in Portland because he had always lived there and because he had no reason to believe that life anywhere else would be better, or different. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Now the purpose of her stories had changed. She spun them to discover their meaning. In the telling, she found, you reached a point where you could not go back, where - as the stories changed - it transformed you, too. ~ Ursula Hegi

Infinite are the arguments of mages, ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

A beautiful, swirled brown and white shell like the one Ursula used to wear, but larger. A whelk, not a nautilus. Vareet picked it up in wonder, turning it over in her hands, admiring its gleam in the moonlight. On a whim she put it to her ear.
Her eyes widened.
In the depths of the shell, she could hear what must have been the echo of distant waves... and also the song of a mermaid. ~ Liz Braswell

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You're trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn't suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin