Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes - Page 2

What good is power when you're too wise to use it?

Everything is old, here. We are old - the Masters."
"You're not," Irian said. She thought him between thirty and forty[...]
"But I came far. Miles can be years.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

She'll die.'
'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.

There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.

Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.

You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.

For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.

This concern, feebly called 'love of nature', seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.

As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

To light a candle is to cast a shadow...

But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.

In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.

To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.

Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.

They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.