Ursula K. Le Guin

“Ölümden korkuyordum. Ölümden o kadar korkuyordum ki belki de ölüyorsunuzdur diye, size bakamıyordum bile. Benim için ölmemenin, eğer bulabilirsem, bir... bir yolu olduğundan başka hiçbir şey düşünemiyordum. Fakat, sanki büyük bir yara varmış da kanıyormuş gibi, -sizinki gibi- hayat sürekli akıp gidiyordu. Fakat her şeyde bu vardı. Ve ben hiçbir şey, hiçbir şey yapmadım; sadece ölmenin korkusundan saklanmaya çalıştım.”

“I did not deliberately invent Earthsea, I did not think ‘Hey wow — islands are archetypes and archipelagoes are superarchetypes and let’s build us an archipelago! I am not an engineer, but an explorer. I discovered Earthsea.”

“No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.”

“I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls.”

“My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn’t be given, wouldn’t be taken, but chose my man and my fate.”

“Ged issò la vela. Tutto aveva l'aria di essere stato usato a lungo, faticosamente, sebbene la vela rossocupa fosse rattoppata con grande cura e la barca fosse pulita e ben tenuta. erano come il loro padrone: erano andate lontano, e la vita non le aveva trattate con dolcezza.— Ora — disse Ged, — ora siamo partiti, ora siamo liberi, siamo andati, Tenar. Lo senti anche tu?Lei lo sentiva. Una mano tenebrosa aveva allentato la stretta che aveva serrato il suo cuore per tutta la vita. Ma non provava più gioia, come l'aveva provata invece tra le montagne. Abbassò la testa tra le braccia e pianse, e le sue guance erano umide e salmastre. Piangeva per lo spreco dei suoi anni, asserviti a un male inutile. Piangeva di dolore, perché era libera.Aveva incominciato ad apprendere il peso della libertà. La libertà è un fardello oneroso, un grande e strano fardello per lo spirito che se l'addossa. Non è agevole. Non è un dono ma una scelta, e la scelta può essere dura. La strada sale, verso la luce: ma il viandante oberato può anche non raggiungerla mai.”

“You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do - they never adapt either.”

“Her şey konuşur; duymak istiyorsan, sessiz ol...”

“Hemos llegado, desde una gran distancia el uno al otro. Siempre lo hemos hecho. A través de grandes distancias, a través de años, a través de abismos de casualidad. Porque él viene de tan lejos, nada puede separarnos. Nada, ni la distancia, ni los años, puede ser más grande que la distancia que siempre estuvo entre nosotros, la distancia de nuestro sexo, la diferencia de nuestro ser, la de nuestras mentes; esa brecha, ese abismo que salvamos con una mirada, un roce, una palabra, la cosa más simple del mundo. Mira lo lejos que está, dormido. Mira lo lejos que está, lo lejos que está siempre. Pero vuelve, vuelve, vuelve...”

“...la diferencia no está en copular; está en la otra persona. Y dieciocho años es como si empezaras cuando descubres [i]esa[/i]diferencia. Al menos, si es una mujer lo que estás tratando de entender. A una mujer puede no durarle tanto el misterio de un hombre, aunque quizá representen una comedia... Como quiera que sea, ése es el gusto de la cosa. Los misterios y las comedias y todo lo demás. La variedad. La variedad no se obtiene sólo yendo de un lado a otro (...) No es ir de un lado a otro lo que te mantiene vivo. Es tener tu propio tiempo. Trabajar con el tiempo, no contra él.”

“So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom...”

“The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”

“What good is music? None, Gage thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses that men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.”

“I want to say to the literature teacher who remains wilfully, even boastfully ignorant of a major element of contemporary fiction: you are incompetent to teach or judge your subject. Readers and students who do know the field, meanwhile, have every right to challenge your ignorant prejudice. Rise, undergraduates of the English departments! You have nothing to lose but your A on the midterm!”

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

“There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom.”

“As a man's knowledge grows, and his power increases, the road he takes grows ever narrower, until at last he does only and wholly what he must.”

“We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.”

“On the blank leaf glued to the inner back cover I drew the double curve within the circle, and blacked the yin half of the symbol, then pushed it back to my companion. ‘Do you know that sign?’He looked at it a long time with a strange look, but he said, ‘No.’‘It’s found on Earth, and on Hain-Davenant, and on Chiffewar. It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness…how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.”

“Students are intense people, they laugh and cry, they break down and rebuild.”

“I always grow poetic when I am lying to myself.”

“I found out I was in love with you, winter before last," she said. "I wasn't going to say anything about it because - well, you know. If you'd felt anything like that for me, you'd have known I did. But it wasn't both of us. So there was no good in it. But then, when you told us you're leaving ... At first I thought, all the more reason to say nothing. But then I thought, that wouldn't be fair. To me, partly. Love has a right to be spoken. And you have a right to know that somebody loves you. That somebody has loved you, could love you. We all need to know that. [...]”

“Hideo," said my mother, in the terrifying way women have of passing without interval from one subject to another because they have them all present in their mind at once, "you haven't found any kind of relationship?”

“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 make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report.”

“Time is not duration but intensity; time is the beat and the interval [...]”

“Fact is one of our finest fictions.”

“Tezyeme," he said, which meant something on the order of "it is happening the way it is supposed to happen.”

“We didn't talk about problems, or parents, or automobiles, or ambitions. We talked about life....And the sea was there, forty feet away and getting closer, and the sky over the sea, and the sun going down the sky. And it was cold, and it was the high point of my life. I'd had high points before.Once at night walking in the park in the rain in autumn.Once out in the desert, under the stars, when I turned into the earth turning on its axis. Sometimes thinking, just thinking things through.But always alone. By myself.This time I was not alone. I was on the high mountain with a friend. There is nothing, there is nothing that beats that. If it never happens again in my life, still I can say I was there once.”

“Reading is performance. The reader-- the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk-- performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.”

“But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.”

“We men dream dreams, we work magic, we do good, we do evil. The dragons do not dream. They are dreams. They do not work magic: it is their substance, their being. They do not do; they are.”

“Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.”

“But I liked the writing better. I could make it look beautiful. I could keep it. The spoken words just went out like the wind, and you always had to say them all over again to keep them alive. But the writing stayed, and you could learn to make it better. More beautiful.”

“We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain.”

“But nobody in one lifetime could read more than a fragment of what was here, this broken labyrinth of words, this shattered, interrupted story of a people and a world through the centuries, the millennia.”

“So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.”

“In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.”

“On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate.”

“For they were alone, and he was one of the seven persons in the world who knew the Archmage's name. The others were the Master Namer of Roke; and Ogion the Silent, the wizard of Re Albi, who long ago on the mountain of Gont had given Ged that name; and the White Lady of Gont, Tenar of the Ring; and a village wizard in Iffish called Vetch; and in Iffish again, a house-carpenter's wife, mother of three girls, ignorant of all sorcery but wise in other things, who was called Yarrow; and finally, on the other side of Earthsea, in the farthest west, two dragons: Orm Embar and Kalessin.”

“Light is the left hand of darkness.”

“Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of its existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering - unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.”

“I've been looking only at what's to be done next and forgetting why we're doing it.”

“Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.The value judgement concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction.Every readable novel can give true pleasure. Every novel read by choice is read because it gives true pleasure.Literature consists of many genres, including mystery, science fiction, fantasy, naturalism, realism, magical realism, graphic, erotic, experimental, psychological, social, political, historical, bildungsroman, romance, western, army life, young adult, thriller, etc., etc…. and the proliferating cross-species and subgenres such as erotic Regency, noir police procedural, or historical thriller with zombies.Some of these categories are descriptive, some are maintained largely as marketing devices. Some are old, some new, some ephemeral.Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood: but no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior.(Hypothesis on Literature vs. Genre)”

“La luz es la mano izquierda de la oscuridad, y la oscuridad es la mano derecha de la luz; las dos son una, vida y muerte, juntas como amantes”

“There was room for them. A great deal of Italy, back then, was forest. Where man goes, trees die; or, to paraphrase Tacitus, we make a desert and call it progress.”

“Why must there be war?" "Oh Lavinia, what a woman's question that is! Because men are men.”

“I never thought before," said Tirin unruffled, "of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, 'Look there's the Moon.' Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth.""Where, then, is Truth?" declaimed Bedap, and yawned."In the hill one happens to be sitting on," said Tirin.”

“The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.”

“If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.”