Quote

I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ursula K. Le Guin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1929
Born: October 21
Died: 2018
Died: January 22
Author
Feminist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Berkeley
California
Ursula Kroeber
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Separate
Personal
Write
Writing
Trying
Something
Demonstration
Activism
Showing

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Image
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
We sleep researchers like cats, you know they sleep a lot!
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
There are very real differences between science fiction and realistic fiction, between horror and fantasy, between romance and mystery. Differences in writing them, in reading them, in criticizing them. Vive les différences! They're what gives each genre its singular flavor and savor, its particular interest for the reader - and the writer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life--evolution--the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy--existence itself--is essentially change.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Almost everything is double like that for adolescents their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall they see through everything, and are blind.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
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
Image
It is good to have an end to journey towards but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le Guin