Ursula K. LeGuin Quotes (14 Quotes)

True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blonde Hero really look and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. 'You must change your life,' he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces what they want is control. Control over behavior power over women.

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

Its queer that daylights not enough. We need the shadows, in order to walk.

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.

They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. 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. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold, we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas They were not naive and happy children - though their children were, in fact happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched.

I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.