Quote

A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

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
Persons
Person
Yearn
Play
Denied
Whole
Believes
Believe
Fit
Things
Whatever
Time
Desire
Part

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Image
I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Do you know how to read? No. It is one of the black arts. He nodded. But a useful one, he said.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God's truth, the universe at once began to exist.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.
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
Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
Ursula K. Le Guin