Valmori Le Quotes

Doubt is not below knowledge, but above it. ~ Alain-Rene Le Sage

For to keep dark the mind of the mageborn, that is a dangerous thing. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Young Sathian was flirtatious, titillating, quick-witted, and brilliant. He left a trail of broken hearts across the land as he teased and taunted his victims with his beauty and charm. Both women and men succumbed to his joie de vivre and panache as he was an untypical Ange'el that carried the sunshine in his smile and in his eyes. ~ Jamie Le Fay

We just don't know what people are like, we can never tell; there isn't any truth about human beings, no formula that meets each one of us. ~ John Le Carre

The fact that the Hegnish have absolutely no interest in any people except themselves can also cause offense, or even rage. Foreigners exist. That is all the Hegnish know about them, and all they care to know. They are too polite to say that it is a pity that foreigners exist, but if they had to think about it, they would think so. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Well, this. That we're ashamed to say we've refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don't cooperate - we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor's opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You don't believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why he's a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminal! We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We've made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can't see them, because they're part of our thinking. Tir never did that I knew him since we were ten years old. He never did it, he never could build walls. He was a natural rebel. He was a natural Odonian - a real one! He was a free man, and the rest of us, his brothers, drove him insane in punishment for his first free act. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I am not sure who I am," I said cautiously.

"Many people never are," she said. "But it doesn't matter, you know. If for one moment of your whole life you know that you are, then that's your life, that moment, that's unnua, that's all. In a short life I saw my mother's face, like the sun. So I'm here. In a long life I went there and there and there; but I dug in the garden, the root of a weed came up in my hand, so I am unnua. When you get old, you know, you keep being here instead of there, everything is here. Everything is here," she repeated. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Sci-fi uses the images that sf - starting with H.G. Wells - made familiar: space travel, aliens, galactic wars and federations, time machines, et cetera, taking them literally, not caring if they are possible or even plausible. It has no interest in or relation to real science or technology. It's fantasy in space suits. Spectacle. Wizards with lasers. Kids with ray guns. I've written both, but I have to say I respect science fiction enough that I wince when people call it sci-fi. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

One more consideration also weighed with Smiley, though in his paper he is too gentlemanly to mention it. A lot of ghosts walked in those post-fall days, and one of them was a fear that, buried somewhere in the Circus, lay Bill Haydon's chosen successor: that Bill had brought him on, recruited and educated him against the very day when he himself, one way or another, would fade from the scene. Sam was originally a Haydon nominee. His later victimisation by Haydon could easily have been a put-up job. Who was to say, in that very jumpy atmosphere, that Sam Collins, manoeuvring for readmission, was not the heir elect to Haydon's treachery?
For all these reasons George Smiley put on his raincoat and got himself out on the street. Willingly, no doubt - for at heart, he was still a case man. Even his detractors gave him that. ~ John Le Carre

Fish and visitors stink after three days. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Survival ... is an infinite capacity for suspicion. ~ John Le Carre

She was the Qin Goddess of Gui Le, He Xia's maid, the former highest ranking Bei Mo army official and at the same time, the Duke of Zhen-Bei's wife. ~ Feng Nong

Standing 89 feet high, the Carthay Circle Theatre is actually taller than Sleeping Beauty Castle. ~ Leslie Le Mon

She was the woman in the table. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

There is at Christmas time a great deal of hypocrisy, honourable hypocrisy, hypocrisy undertaken pour le bon motif, c'est entendu, but nevertheless hypocrisy! ~ Agatha Christie

There must be an authority, and we believe that the most qualified authority in a household is the man's. ~ Jean-Marie Le Pen

Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The true system of the World has been recognized, developed and perfected ... Everything has been discussed and analysed, or at least mentioned. ~ Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

A philospher sees the Earth as a large planet, travelling through the heavens, covered with fools ~ Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle

We must always skim over pleasures. They are like marshy lands that we must travel nimbly, hardly daring to put down our feet. ~ Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle

Nature intends that, at fixed periods, men should succeed each other by the instrumentality of death. We shall never outwit Nature; we shall die as usual. ~ Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle

Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Smiley was the oddest. You thought, to look at him, that he couldn't cross the road alone, but you might as well have offered protection to a hedgehog. ~ John Le Carre

If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I've studied the disease, I've lived in the swamp. It is my informed conclusion that we are suffering, as an ex-great nation, from top-down corporate rot. And that's not just the judgement of an ailing old fart. A lot of people in my Service make a profession of not seeing things in black and white. Do not confuse me with them. I'm a late-onset, red-toothed radical with balls. Still with me? ~ John Le Carre

Vehicular traffic is completely forbidden in the green strips, where tranquility shall reign and the curse of noise shall not penetrate. ~ Le Corbusier

You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty. ~ John Le Carre

His cock is inked. ~ Georgia Le Carre

Ged said at last, speaking low, "There is a thing that I fear, Estarriol. I fear it more if you are with me when I go. There in the Hands in the dead end of the inlet I turned upon the shadow, it was within my hands' reach, and I seized it - I tried to seize it. And there was nothing I could hold. I could not defeat it. It fled, I followed. But that may happen again, and yet again. I have no power over the thing. There may be neither death nor triumph to end this quest; nothing to sing of; no end. It may be I must spend my life running from sea to sea and land to land on an endless vain venture, a shadow-quest. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You could be the perfect spy. All you need is a cause. ~ John Le Carre

Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that it depended on him, verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de ses peuples1 - as Alexander expressed it in the last letter he wrote him - he had never been so much in the grip of inevitable laws, which compelled him, while thinking that he was acting on his own volition, to perform for the swarm-life - that is to say for history - whatever had to be performed. ~ Leo Tolstoy

When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats. ~ John Le Carre

Intelligence work has one moral law - it is justified by results. ~ John Le Carre

Ambition is a funny thing. You can completely screw yourself with it if you're not careful. ~ Simon Le Bon

John le Carre's 'The Night Manager' is a relentlessly exhilarating thriller with profound emotional depths. ~ Susanne Bier

What is more arrogant than honesty? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

An artist makes the world her world. An artist makes her world the world. For a little while. For as long as it takes to look at or listen or to watch or read the work of art. Like a crystal, the work of art seems to contain the whole, and to imply eternity. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

When you're the single French person in the middle of 10 Tunisians, the majority will impose their way of life on the minority. ~ Marion Marechal-Le Pen