Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Fantasy
Probably
Talking
Reality
Oldest
Device
Literary
Devices
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
There's no way to use power for good.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The backside of heroism is often rather sad women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
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
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
Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
Ursula K. Le Guin