Quote

We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, in all its forms, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?

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
Thousand
Millennia
Single
Histories
Rest
Anarchism
Born
Hundreds
Form
Civilized
Everything
Forms
Nothing
Sun
Life
Tried

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Image
When action grows unprofitable, gather information when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!
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
George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The machine conceals the machinations.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
There are dance artists, painting artists and writing artists. Authors are writing artists. You can practice art in whatever medium you choose, and words are mine.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.
Ursula K. Le Guin