A people that doesn’t live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and storytellers, is in a bad way. The center of the world is where you live fully, where you know how things are done, how things are done rightly, done well.
Ursula K. Le Guin urges authors to remember why they do what they do. Her argument is that writing is an form of art rather than a commodity.
The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isn’t the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.
Would you walk away from Omelas?
If nobody teaches us the words, the thoughts, we stay ignorant. If nobody shows a little child, two, three years old, how to look for the way, the signs of the path, the landmarks, then it gets lost in the mountain, doesn’t it? And dies in the night, in the cold.
Large, general questions about meaning, etc., can only be answered with generalities, which make me uncomfortable, because it is so hard to be honest when you generalize. If you skip over all the details, how can you tell if you’re being honest or not?
I bid your voice be dumb until the day you find a word worth speaking.
They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. But I will not believe that. I want the walls down. I want solidarity, human solidarity.
Positive thinking founded on denial may not be so great.
So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.
There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty.
The interplay of the aesthetic with the erotic is complex. The peacock’s tail is beautiful to us, sexy to the peahen. Beauty and sexual attractiveness overlap, coincide. They may be deeply related. I think they should not be confused.
We cried “Sisterhood is powerful!” – and they believed us. Terrified misogynists of both sexes were howling that the house was burning down before most feminists found out where the matches were.
Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men?
Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?
Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can’t life and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice.
A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being.
Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing.
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.
He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.