Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes - Page 4

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.

You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.

What is life without incompatible realities?

The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.

Without war there are no heroes."

"What harm would that be?"

"Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.

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.

In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.

My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war.

The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again.

But if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of the job to be done and one's ability to do it, then you might say the chief virtue of excellent artists is their modesty...But knowing your limits and going to them isn't arrogance. It's greatness of spirit.

It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.

I'm a lazy man. With lazy dreams. I need Tai to wake me up, make me vibrate, irritate me. I need my angry woman, my unforgiving friend.

We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.

Orr slept. He dreamed. There was no rub.

Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known.

...you play the instrument you have.

A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.

Freedom is never very safe.