Quote

What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone.

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
Call
Psychosis
Live
Companionship
Human
Realism
Humans
Beings
Sometimes
Simply
Needs
Least
Thing
Alive
Alone

More quotes by 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
As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. . . . . All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I know that nobody who hasn't been in battle or under attack can know what war is. But even in terms of being safe at home, it's also true that many Americans who think they know what being at war is, don't. Including, of course, George W. Bush and his people. They don't have a clue.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.
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
There's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Dreams take short cuts.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I gather that a lot of the pots in the great museum in Baghdad, which we allowed to be looted and then gutted, are now for sale to the highest bidder on the art and archeology black market. This is good capitalism, I guess, while a museum, being a public trust and accessible to all, is anticapitalist, pretty damn near socialist in fact.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.
Ursula K. Le Guin