Quote

What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.

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
Practice
Voices
Voice
Hearing
Used
Using
Writing
Case
People
Conscious
Cases
Needed
Serious

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Image
All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
If your voice is heard by more people because you've earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
True understanding is the spur of genius
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. If it is not, what is? He could not endure those remembered words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time. As all the stars may be reflected in a round raindrop falling in the night: so too do all the stars reflect the raindrop. There is neither darkness nor death, for all things are, in the Light of the Moment, and their end and their beginning are one.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else
Ursula K. Le Guin