Ursula K. Le Guin
US-based author, known mostly for writing science fiction and fantasy.
The First Envoy to a world always comes alone. One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.
Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”
“The first lesson on Roke, and the last is, Do what is needful! And no more.”
“The lessons in between, then, must consist in learning what is needful.”
“They do.”
It may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.
A man can trust his luck, but a society can’t; and cultural change, like random mutation, may make things chancier. So they have gone very slowly. At any one point in their history a hasty observer would say that all technological progress and diffusion had ceased. Yet it never has. Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.
But maybe you're just as glad he’s not a shrink, eh? Awful to have your spouse analyzing your unconscious desires across the dinner table, eh?
“Is it different, then, for men and for women?”
“What isn’t, dearie?”
It is light that defeats the dark.
All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.
They say Mars absolves the warrior from the crimes of war, but those who were not the warriors, those for whom the war was said to be fought, even though they never wanted it to be fought, who absolves them?
“A king has soldiers, servants, messengers, lieutenants. He governs through his servants. Where are the servants of this—Anti-king?”
“In our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live! The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple.”
Highdrake said that to make love is to unmake power.
The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars.
We live well in the houses—well enough. But we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars, and now we dare not go a hundred miles from home. We keep a little knowledge, and do nothing with it. But once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life. We did man’s work.
To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.