If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid.
("The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia")
More Quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin:
To me the ''female principle'' is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.Ursula K. Le Guin
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
Ursula K. Le Guin
But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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 great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. 'If it is not, what is' He could not endure those remembered words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.
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It's all about putting the best team together - not just in the front office but the players on the field.
John Elway