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Do Nothing Because It Is Righteous Or Praiseworthy Or Noble To Do So; Do Nothing Because It Seems Good To Do So; Do Only That Which You Must Do And Which You Cannot Do In Any Other Way.

-Ursula K. Le Guin

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Do Nothing Because It

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Do Nothing Because It Is Righteous Or Praiseworthy Or Noble To Do So; Do Nothing Because It Seems Good To Do So; Do Only That Which You Must Do And Which You Cannot Do In Any Other Way.

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More From Ursula K. Le Guin

It Always Seemed To Me They're Sort Of Alike ... Magic And Music. Spells And Tunes. For One Thing, You Have To Get Them Just Exactly Right.

If You Have To Find Devices To Coax Yourself To Stay Focused On Writing, Perhaps You Should Not Be Writing What You're Writing. And If This Lack Of Motivation Is A Constant Problem, Perhaps Writing Is Not Your Forte. I Mean, What Is The Problem? If Writing Bores You, That Is Pretty Fatal. If That Is Not The Case, But You Find That It Is Hard Going And It Just Doesn't Flow, Well, What Did You Expect? It Is Work; Art Is Work.

The Place They Go Towards Is A Place Even Less Imaginable To Us Than The City Of Happiness. I Cannot Describe It At All. It Is Possible It Does Not Exist. But They Seem To Know Where They Are Going, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.

We're Each Of Us Alone, To Be Sure. What Can You Do But Hold Your Hand Out In The Dark?

If Civilization Has An Opposite, It Is War.

I've Got Some Gift For Languages. You Follow Your Gift. But Latin's Not Easy.

Sometimes You Must Go Against The Wheel's Turn.

I'd Rather Get Bad News From An Honest Man Than Lies From A Flatterer.

Age And Illness Made One A Dualist

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.

Sometimes I Not Only Stand There And Take It, I Even Smile At Them And Say I'm Sorry. When I Feel That Smile Coming Onto My Face, I Wish I Could Take My Face Off And Stamp On It.

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.

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.

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.

If You See A Whole Thing - It Seems That It's Always Beautiful. Planets, Lives... But Up Close A World's All Dirt And Rocks. And Day To Day, Life's A Hard Job, You Get Tired, You Lose The Pattern.

Those Who Dislike Fantasy Are Very Often Equally Bored Or Repelled By Science. They Don't Like Either Hobbits, Or Quasars; They Don't Feel At Home With Them; They Don't Want Complexities, Remoteness. If There Is Any Such Connection, I'll Bet That It Is Basically An Aesthetic One

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

To See A Candle's Light One Must Take It Into A Dark Place.

You Can Go Home Again...so Long As You Understand That Home Is A Place Where You Have Never Been.

I Had Forgotten How Much Light There Is In The World, Till You Gave It Back To Me.

It Is Only When Science Asks Why, Instead Of Simply Describing How, That It Becomes More Than Technology. When It Asks Why, It Discovers Relativity. When It Only Shows How, It Invents The Atom Bomb, And Then Puts Its Hands Over Its Eye And Says, My God What Have I Done?

Greed Puts Out The Sun.

Yet We Were Rescued By That Fancy, And Saved By A Myth.

As A Writer You Are Free. You Are About The Freest Person That Ever Was. Your Freedom Is What You Have Bought With Your Solitude, Your Loneliness. You Are In The Country Where You Make Up The Rules, The Laws. You Are Both Dictator And Obedient Populace. It Is A Country Nobody Has Ever Explored Before. It Is Up To You To Make The Maps, To Build The Cities. Nobody Else In The World Can Do It, Or Ever Could Do It, Or Ever Will Be Able To Do It Again.

I Always Wondered Why The Makers Leave Housekeeping And Cooking Out Of Their Tales. Isn't It What All The Great Wars And Battles Are Fought For -- So That At Day's End A Family May Eat Together In A Peaceful House?

Any Artist Must Expect To Work Amid The Total, Rational Indifference Of Everybody Else To Their Work, For Years, Perhaps For Life.

You Sit Down And You Do It, And You Do It, And You Do It, Until You Have Learned To Do It.

When The Enemy Enthusiastically Embraces You, And The Fellow Countrymen Bitterly Reject You, It Is Hard Not To Wonder If You Are, In Fact, A Traitor.

Take The Tale In Your Teeth, Then, And Bite Till The Blood Runs, Hoping It's Not Poison.

Almost Anything Carried To A Logical Extreme Becomes Depressing.

When In The Land Of Property Think Like A Propertarian. Dress Like One, Eat Like One, Act Like One, Be One.

When The Genuine Myth Rises Into Consciousness, That Is Always Its Message. You Must Change Your Life.

Changing Your Life

I Have Decided That The Trouble With Print Is, It Never Changes Its Mind.

Reading Is Performance. The Reader--the Child Under The Blanket With A Flashlight, The Woman At The Kitchen Table, The Man At The Library Desk--performs The Work. The Performance Is Silent. The Readers Hear The Sounds Of The Words And The Beat Of The Sentences Only In Their Inner Ear. Silent Drummers On Noiseless Drums. An Amazing Performance In An Amazing Theater.

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.

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.

Ignorant Power Is A Bane!

No Matter How Successful, Beloved, Influential Her Work Was, When A Woman Author Dies, Nine Times Out Of Ten, She Gets Dropped From The Lists, The Courses, The Anthologies, While The Men Get Kept. ... If She Had The Nerve To Have Children, Her Chances Of Getting Dropped Are Higher Still. ... So If You Want Your Writing To Be Taken Seriously, Don't Marry And Have Kids, And Above All, Don't Die. But If You Have To Die, Commit Suicide. They Approve Of That.

The Preservation Of Life Seems To Be Rather A Slogan Than A Genuine Goal Of The Anti-abortion Forces; What They Want Is Control. Control Over Behavior: Power Over Women. Women In The Anti-choice Movement Want To Share In Male Power Over Women, And Do So By Denying Their Own Womanhood, Their Own Rights And Responsibilities.

There's A Good Deal In Common Between The Mind's Eye And The Tv Screen, And Though The Tv Set Has All Too Often Been The Boobtube, It Could Be, It Can Be, The Box Of Dreams.

I Use A Whole Lot Of Half-assed Semicolons; There Was One Of Them Just Now; That Was A Semicolon After 'semicolons,' And Another One After 'now.

We Scarcely Know How Much Of Our Pleasure And Interest In Life Comes To Us Through Our Eyes Until We Have To Do Without Them; And Part Of That Pleasure Is That The Eyes Can Choose Where To Look. But The Ears Can't Choose Where To Listen.

There Is No Kingdom Like The Forests.

It Had Never Occurred To Me Before That Music And Thinking Are So Much Alike. In Fact You Could Say Music Is Another Way Of Thinking, Or Maybe Thinking Is Another Kind Of Music.

He Is Far Too Intelligent To Become Really Cerebral.

The Misogyny That Shapes Every Aspect Of Our Civilization Is The Institutionalized Form Of Male Fear And Hatred Of What They Have Denied And Therefore Cannot Know, Cannot Share: That Wild Country, The Being Of Women.

Sleeping People Are So Remote.... Right Here, But Out Of Communication. That's What Strikes Humans As Uncanny About Sleep. Its Utter Privacy. The Sleeper Turns His Back On Everyone.

Not Even Need And Love Can Defeat Fate.

I Have Told The Story I Was Asked To Tell. I Have Closed It, As So Many Stories Close, With A Joining Of Two People. What Is One Man's And One Woman's Love And Desire, Against The History Of Two Worlds, The Great Revolutions Of Our Lifetimes, The Hope, The Unending Cruelty Of Our Species? A Little Thing. But A Key Is A Little Thing, Next To The Door It Opens. If You Lose The Key, The Door May Never Be Unlocked. It Is In Our Bodies That We Lose Or Begin Our Freedom, In Our Bodies That We Accept Or End Our Slavery. So I Wrote This Book For My Friend, With Whom I Have Lived And Will Die Free.

The Pornography Of Violence Of Course Far Exceeds, In Volume And General Acceptance, Sexual Pornography, In This Puritan Land Of Ours.

One Of The Things [fiction] Does Is Lead You To Recognize What You Did Not Know Before.

And I Needed A Rock. Something To Hold Onto, To Stand On. Something Solid. Because Everything Was Going Soft, Turning Into Mush, Into Marsh, Into Fog. Fog Closing In On All Sides. I Didn't Know Where I Was At All.

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.

Great Self-destruction Follows Upon Unfounded Fear.

Self Destruction

To Learn Which Questions Are Unanswerable, And Not To Answer Them: This Skill Is Most Needful In Times Of Stress And Darkness.

To Oppose Something Is To Maintain It.

Law Of Attraction

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.

The Future Has Become Uninhabitable. Such Hopelessness Can Arise, I Think, Only From An Inability To Face The Present, To Live In The Present, To Live As A Responsible Being Among Other Beings In This Sacred World Here And Now, Which Is All We Have, And All We Need, To Found Our Hope Upon.

Owning Is Owing, Having Is Hoarding.

To Claim Power Over What You Do Not Understand Is Not Wise, Nor Is The End Of It Likely To Be Good.

After A Long Time Spent Learning How To Write As A Woman Instead Of As An Honorary Man, I Was Able To Come Back To Earthsea And Write The Next Three Books In Another And Newer Tradition: That Of Questioning, Rather Than Accepting, The Gendering Of Power As Male.

There Is No Information About Corporations. There Is Only Disinformation.

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.

If We Can Get That Realistic Feminine Morality Working For Us, If We Can Trust Ourselves And So Let Women Think And Feel That An Unwanted Child Or An Oversize Family Is Wrong -- Not Ethically Wrong, Not Against The Rules, But Morally Wrong, All Wrong, Wrong Like A Thalidomide Birth, Wrong Like Taking A Wrong Step That Will Break Your Neck -- If We Can Get Feminine And Human Morality Out From Under The Yoke Of A Dead Ethic, Then Maybe We'll Begin To Get Somewhere On The Road That Leads To Survival.

Art Is Craft: All Art Is Always And Essentially A Work Of Craft: But In The True Work Of Art, Before The Craft And After It, Is Some Essential Durable Core Of Being, Which Is What The Craft Works On, And Shows, And Sets Free. The Statue In The Stone. How Does The Artist Find That, See It, Before It's Visible? That Is A Real Question.

I Do Not Care What Comes After; I Have Seen The Dragons On The Wind Of Morning.

There Are Things That Outweigh Comfort, Unless One Is An Old Woman Or A Cat.

The Desire For Power Feeds Off Itself, Growing As It Devours.

Desire For Power

We Are Volcanoes. When We Women Offer Our Experience As Our Truth, As Human Truth, All The Maps Change. There Are New Mountains.

Claude Levi-strauss Has Been A Great Source Of Fruitful Irritation To My Mind.

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.

In Art, 'good Enough' Is Not Good Enough.

Not Good Enough

Between Thought And Spoken Word Is A Gap Where Intention Can Enter, The Symbol Be Twisted Aside, And The Lie Come To Be.

Freedom Is A Heavy Load, A Great And Strange Burden For The Spirit To Undertake. It Is Not Easy. It Is Not A Gift Given, But A Choice Made, And The Choice May Be A Hard One. The Road Goes Upward Towards The Light; But The Laden Traveler May Never Reach The End Of It.

There's No Way To Use Power For Good.

We Sleep Researchers Like Cats, You Know; They Sleep A Lot!

A Profound Love Between Two People Involves, After All, The Power And Chance Of Doing Profound Hurt.

There Is A Limited Number Of Plots. There Is No Limit To The Number Of Stories.

What Is Love Of One's Country; Is It Hate Of One's Uncountry? Then It's Not A Good Thing.

Darkness Is Only In The Mortal Eye, That Thinks It Sees, But Sees Not.

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.

Safety Lies In Catering To The In-group. We Are Not All Brave. All I Would Ask Of Writers Who Find It Hard To Question The Universal Validity Of Their Personal Opinions And Affiliations Is That They Consider This: Every Group We Belong To - By Gender, Sex, Race, Religion, Age - Is An In-group, Surrounded By An Immense Out-group, Living Next Door And All Over The World, Who Will Be Alive As Far Into The Future As Humanity Has A Future. That Out-group Is Called Other People. It Is For Them That We Write.

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. What Is The Other Text, The Original? I Have No Answer. I Suppose It Is The Source, The Deep Sea Where Ideas Swim, And One Catches Them In Nets Of Words And Swings Them Shining Into The Boat... Where In This Metaphor They Die And Get Canned And Eaten In Sandwiches.

Gradually The Healing Took Place, Seeming As It Always Does That It Wasn't Taking Place.

It Is Not Human To Be Without Shame And Without Desire.

To Think That Realistic Fiction Is By Definition Superior To Imaginative Fiction Is To Think Imitation Is Superior To Invention.

What Children Don't Understand, And Can't Understand Until They Grow Up Some, Is How Much The Whole Fabric And Process Of Human Society Depends On Everybody Agreeing To Ignore, Most Of The Time, The Fact That All Of Us Are, Most Of The Time, Inadequate, Incompetent, Pitiful, And, In Fact, Naked To Our Enemies. None Of Us Really Has Very Much In The Way Of Spiritual, Moral Clothing. We Dress Ourselves In Rags. And We Agree To Say Nothing About It. To A Very Large Extent, It Is Human Charity That Clothes Us.

If You Evade Suffering, You Also Evade The Chance Of Joy.

Maybe When You Meet The People You Are Supposed To Meet You Know It, Without Knowing It.

I'm Not A Quester Or A Searcher For The Truth. I Don't Really Think There Is One Answer, So I Never Went Looking For It. My Impulse Is Less Questing And More Playful. I Like Trying On Ideas And Ways Of Life And Religious Approaches. I'm Just Not A Good Candidate For Conversion.

Prose Writers Are Interested Mostly In Life And Commas.

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.

What Is The Use Trying To Describe The Flowing Of A River At Any One Moment, And Then At The Next Moment, And Then At The Next, And The Next, And The Next? You Wear Out. You Say: There Is A Great River, And It Flows Through This Land, And We Have Named It History.

But You Must Not Change One Thing, One Pebble, One Grain Of Sand, Until You Know What Good And Evil Will Follow On That Act. The World Is In Balance, In Equilibrium. A Wizard's Power Of Changing And Summoning Can Shake The Balance Of The World. It Is Dangerous, That Power...it Must Follow Knowledge, And Serve Need.

One Voice Speaking Truth Is A Greater Force Than Fleets And Armies.

Those Who Build Walls Are Their Own Prisoners.

Statesmen Remember Things Selectively.

In The Tale, In The Telling, We Are All One Blood. Take The Tale In Your Teeth, Then, And Bite Till The Blood Runs, Hoping It's Not Poison; And We Will All Come To The End Together, And Even To The Beginning: Living, As We Do, In The Middle.

I Can Never Get Used To The Fact, Though I Know It, That Women Are Born Cynics. Men Have To Learn Cynicism. Infant Girls Could Teach It To Them.

Now Perhaps An Excessive Dread Of Overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects Not An Outward Reality, But An Inward State Of Mind. If You Feel Overcrowded When You're Not, What Does That Mean? Maybe That You're Afraid Of Human Contact--of Being Close To People, Of Being Touched.

All Knowledge Is Local, All Truth Is Partial. No Truth Can Make Another Truth Untrue. All Knowledge Is Part Of The Whole Knowledge. Once You Have Seen The Larger Pattern, You Cannot Go Back To Seeing The Part As The Whole.

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.

As You See, I Bear Some Resentment And Some Scars From The Years Of Anti-genre Bigotry. My Own Fiction, Which Moves Freely Around Among Realism, Magical Realism, Science Fiction, Fantasy Of Various Kinds, Historical Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Parable, And Other Subgenres, To The Point Where Much Of It Is Ungenrifiable, All Got Shoved Into The Sci Fi Wastebasket Or Labeled As Kiddilit - Subliterature.

I Went To The Springs While The Sun Was Still Up, And Sitting On A Rocky Outcrop Above The Cave Mouth I Watched The Light Grow Reddish Across The Misty Pools, And Listened To The Troubled Voice Of The Water. After A While I Moved Farther Up The Hill, Where I Could Hear Birds Singing Near And Far In The Silence Of The Trees. The Presence Of The Trees Was Very Strong...the Big Oaks Stood So Many, So Massive In Their Other Life, In Their Deep, Rooted Silence: The Awe Of Them Came On Me, The Religion.

It Win Be A Device That Will Permit Communication Without Any Time Interval Between Two Points In Space. The Device Will Not Transmit Messages, Of Course; Simultaneity Is Identity. But To Our Perceptions, That Simultaneity Will Function As A Transmission, A Sending. So We Will Be Able To Use It To Talk Between Worlds, Without The Long Waiting For The Message To Go And The Reply To Return That Electromagnetic Impulses Require. It Is Really A Very Simple Matter. Like A Kind Of Telephone.

It Is Very Hard For Evil To Take Hold Of The Unconsenting Soul.

You Must Not Change One Thing, One Pebble, One Grain Of Sand, Until You Know What Good And Evil Will Follow On That Act.

It's Not A Weapon Or A Woman Can Make A Man, Or Magery Either, Or Any Power, Anything But Himself.

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.

Scientific Truth Will Out, You Can't Hide The Sun Under A Stone.

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.

Would You Really Like To Live In A Society Where You Have No Responsibility And No Freedom, No Choice, Only The False Option Of Obedience To The Law, Or Disobedience Followed By Punishment? Would You Really Want To Go Live In A Prison?

When I Was Young, I Had To Choose Between The Life Of Being And The Life Of Doing. And I Leapt At The Latter Like A Trout To A Fly. But Each Deed You Do, Each Act, Binds You To Itself And To Its Consequences, And Makes You Act Again And Yet Again. Then Very Seldom Do You Come Upon A Space, A Time Like This, Between Act And Act, When You May Stop And Simply Be. Or Wonder Who, After All, You Are.

Lying Is The Misuse Of Language. We Know That. We Need To Remember That It Works The Other Way Round Too. Even With The Best Intentions, Language Misused, Language Used Stupidly, Carelessly, Brutally, Language Used Wrongly, Breeds Lies, Half-truths, Confusion. In That Sense You Can Say That Grammar Is Morality. And It Is In That Sense That I Say A Writer's First Duty Is To Use Language Well.

I Don't Want To Be A Propagandist, No Matter How Good The Cause. I Want To Tell Stories. It's Just That The Stories Have To Square With My Consciousness As A Woman And My Conscience As A Human Being.

It Is No Secret. All Power Is One In Source And End, I Think. Years And Distances, Stars And Candles, Water And Wind And Wizardry, The Craft In A Man's Hand And The Wisdom In A Tree's Root: They All Arise Together. My Name, And Yours, And The True Name Of The Sun, Or A Spring Of Water, Or An Unborn Child, All Are Syllables Of The Great Word That Is Very Slowly Spoken By The Shining Of The Stars. There Is No Other Power. No Other Name.

A Man Who Saw A Miracle Would Reject His Eyes' Witness, If Those With Him Saw Nothing.

We Have Inhabited Both The Actual And The Imaginary Realms For A Long Time. But We Don't Live In Either Place The Way Our Parents Or Ancestors Did. Enchantment Alters With Age, And With The Age. We Know A Dozen Arthurs Now, All Of Them True. The Shire Changed Irrevocably Even In Bilbo's Lifetime. Don Quixote Went Riding Out To Argentina And Met Jorge Luis Borges There. Plus C'est La Même Chose, Plus ça Change.

Belief In Heaven And Hell Is A Big Deal In Judaism, Christianity, And Islam, And Some Forms Of Doctrinaire Buddhism. For The Rest Of Us It's Simply Meaningless. We Don't Live In Order To Die, We Live In Order To Live.

The Machine Conceals The Machinations.

O Foolish Writer. Now Moves. Even In Storytime, Dreamtime, Once-upon-a-time, Now Isn't Then.

Writing Makes No Noise, Except Groans, And It Can Be Done Everywhere, And It Is Done Alone.

Where Does Your Soul Go, When You Die In Hell?

This Is The Treason Of The Artist: A Refusal To Admit The Banality Of Evil And The Terrible Boredom Of Pain.

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.

If Civilization Has An Opposite, It Is War. Of These Two Things, You Have Either One, Or The Other. Not Both.

A Machine Is More Blameless, More Sinless Even Than Any Animal. It Has No Intentions Whatsoever But Our Own.

All Knowledge Is Partial, Infinitesimally Partial. Reason Is A Net Thrown Out Into An Ocean. What Truth It Brings In Is A Fragment, A Glimpse, A Scintillation Of The Whole Truth.

I Think," Tehanu Said In Her Soft, Strange Voice, "that When I Die, I Can Breathe Back The Breath That Made Me Live. I Can Give Back To The World All That I Didn't Do. All That I Might Have Been And Couldn't Be. All The Choices I Didn't Make. All The Things I Lost And Spent And Wasted. I Can Give Them Back To The World. To The Lives That Haven't Been Lived Yet. That Will Be My Gift Back To The World That Gave Me The Life I Did Live, The Love I Loved, The Breath I Breathed.

The Children Of The Revolution Are Always Ungrateful, And The Revolution Must Be Grateful That It Is So.

For A Fiction Writer, A Storyteller, The World Is Full Of Stories, And When A Story Is There, It's There, And You Just Reach Up And Pick It.

No Society Can Change The Nature Of Existence. We Can't Prevent Suffering. This Pain And That Pain, Yes, But Not Pain. A Society Can Only Relieve Social Suffering, Unnecessary Suffering. The Rest Remains. The Root, The Reality.

If You're A Fiction Writer, Though, I Can Tell You How To Let People Talk Through You. Listen. Just Be Quiet, And Listen. Let The Character Talk. Don't Censor, Don't Control. Listen, And Write.

Dead Anarchists Make Martyrs, You Know, And Keep Living For Centuries. But Absent Ones Can Be Forgotten.

One Must Work With Time And Not Against It.

Any Human Power Can Be Resisted And Changed By Human Beings

The One Thing A Writer Has To Have Is A Pencil And Some Paper. That's Enough, So Long As She Knows That She And She Alone Is In Charge Of That Pencil, And Responsible, She And She Alone, For What It Writes On That Paper.

If A Book Were Written All In Numbers, It Would Be True. It Would Be Just. Nothing Said In Words Ever Came Out Quite Even. Things In Words Got Twisted And Ran Together, Instead Of Staying Straight And Fitting Together. But Underneath The Words, At The Center, Like The Center Of The Square, It All Came Out Even. Everything Could Change, Yet Nothing Would Be Lost. If You Saw The Numbers You Could See That, The Balance, The Pattern. You Saw The Foundations Of The World. And They Were Solid.

Even The Best Weapon Is An Unhappy Tool, Hateful To Living Things. So The Follower Of The Way Stays Away From It. Weapons Are Unhappy Tools, Not Chosen By Thoughtful People, To Be Used Only When There Is No Choice, And With A Calm, Still Mind, Without Enjoyment. To Enjoy Using Weapons Is To Enjoy Killing People, And To Enjoy Killing People Is To Lose Your Share In The Common Good. It Is Right That The Murder Of Many People Be Mourned And Lamented. It Is Right That A Victor In War Be Received With Funeral Ceremonies.

What You Love, You Will Love. What You Undertake You Will Complete. You Are A Fulfiller Of Hope; You Are To Be Relied On. But Seventeen Years Give Little Armor Against Despair...consider, Arren. To Refuse Death Is To Refuse Life.

The Borderline Between Prose And Poetry Is One Of Those Fog-shrouded Literary Minefields Where The Wary Explorer Gets Blown To Bits Before Ever Seeing Anything Clearly. It Is Full Of Barbed Wire And The Stumps Of Dead Opinions.

Prose And Poetry

When Action Grows Unprofitable, Gather Information; When Information Grows Unprofitable, Sleep.

To Know There Is A Choice Is To Have To Make The Choice: Change Or Stay: River Or Rock.

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?

To Make A Thief, Make An Owner; To Create Crime, Create Laws.

In Innocence There Is No Strength Against Evil, Said Sparrowhawk, A Little Wryly. But There Is Strength In It For Good.

The Worst Walls Are Never The Ones You Find In Your Way. The Worst Walls Are The Ones You Put There .

Who Knows A Man's Name, Holds That Man's Life In His Keeping. Thus To Ged, Who Had Lost Faith In Himself, Vetch Had Given Him That Gift That Only A Friend Can Give, The Proof Of Unshaken, Unshakeable Trust.

In Reading A Novel, Any Novel, We Have To Know Perfectly Well That The Whole Thing Is Nonsense, And Then, While Reading, Believe Every Word Of It. Finally, When We're Done With It, We May Find - If It's A Good Novel - That We're A Bit Different From What We Were Before We Read It, That We Have Changed A Little... But It's Very Hard To Say Just What We Learned, How We Were Changed.

Hardly Anybody Ever Writes Anything Nice About Introverts. Extroverts Rule. This Is Rather Odd When You Realise That About Nineteen Writers Out Of Twenty Are Introverts. We Are Been Taught To Be Ashamed Of Not Being 'outgoing'. But A Writer's Job Is Ingoing.

Hope Is A Slow Business.

Even In Merely Reading A Fairytale, We Must Let Go Our Daylight Convictions And Trust Ourselves To Be Guided By Dark Figures, In Silence; And When We Come Back, It May Be Very Hard To Describe Where We Have Been.

It Is Hard, I Found, To Be Called Traitor. Strange How Hard It Is, For It's An Easy Name To Call Another Man.

Change Is Freedom, Change Is Life. It's Always Easier Not To Think For Oneself. Find A Nice Safe Hierarchy And Settle In. Don't Make Changes, Don't Risk Disapproval, Don't Upset Your Syndics. It's Always Easiest To Let Yourself Be Governed. There's A Point, Around Age Twenty, When You Have To Choose Whether To Be Like Everybody Else The Rest Of Your Life, Or To Make A Virtue Of Your Peculiarities. Those Who Build Walls Are Their Own Prisoners. I'm Going To Go Fulfil My Proper Function In The Social Organism. I'm Going To Go Unbuild Walls.

Truth Is A Matter Of The Imagination.

The Creative Adult Is The Child Who Has Survived.

By Such Literalism, Fundamentalism, Religions Betrayed The Best Intentions Of Their Founders. Reducing Thought To Formula, Replacing Choice By Obedience, These Preachers Turned The Living Word Into Dead Law.

Success Is Somebody Else's Failure.

A Writer Is A Person Who Cares What Words Mean, What They Say, How They Say It... By Using Words Well They Strengthen Their Souls.

The Earth Is Beautiful, And Bright, And Kindly, But That Is Not All. The Earth Is Also Terrible, And Dark, And Cruel.

Secondhand Experience Breaks Down A Block From The Car Lot.

Planets Were Very Large Places, On Any Scale But That Of The Spaces In Between Them.

Why Can I Never Set My Heart On A Possible Thing?

Every Book Purchase Made From Amazon Is A Vote For A Culture Without Content And Without Contentment.

You Cannot Blame Everything On The Enemy.

I Certainly Wasn't Happy. Happiness Has To Do With Reason, And Only Reason Earns It. What I Was Given Was The Thing You Can't Earn, And Can't Keep, And Often Don't Even Recognize At The Time; I Mean Joy.

What Is Life Without Incompatible Realities?

Sometimes A God Comes.... He Brings A New Way To Do A Thing, Or A New Thing To Be Done. A New Kind Of Singing, Or A New Kind Of Death. He Brings This Across The Bridge Between The Dream-time And The World-time. When He Has Done This, It Is Done. You Cannot Take Things That Exist In The World And Try To Drive Them Back Into The Dream, To Hold Them Inside The Dream With Walls And Pretenses. That Is Insanity. What Is, Is. There Is No Use Pretending, Now, That We Do Not Know How To Kill One Another.

Art, Like Sex, Cannot Be Carried On Indefinitely Solo; After All, They Have The Same Enemy, Sterility.

Jungians Such As Joseph Campbell Have Generalised Such Journeys Into A Set Of Archetypal Events And Images. Though They Can Be Useful In Criticism, I Mistrust Them As Fatally Reductive. “ah, The Night Sea Voyage!” We Cry, Feeling That We Have Understood Something Important — But We’ve Merely Recognised It. Until We Are Actually On That Voyage, We Have Understood Nothing.

You Will Die. You Will Not Live Forever. Nor Will Any Man Nor Any Thing. Nothing Is Immortal. But Only To Us Is It Given To Know That We Must Die. And That Is A Great Gift: The Gift Of Selfhood. For We Have Only What We Know We Must Lose, What We Are Willing To Lose... That Selfhood Which Is Our Torment, And Our Treasure, And Our Humanity, Does Not Endure. It Changes; It Is Gone, A Wave On The Sea. Would You Have The Sea Grow Still And The Tides Cease, To Save One Wave, To Save Yourself?

You Can’t Crush Ideas By Suppressing Them. You Can Only Crush Them By Ignoring Them. By Refusing To Think, Refusing To Change.

Suffering Is Dysfunctional, Except As A Bodily Warning Against Danger. Psychologically And Socially It's Merely Destructive.

Hate Gets Going, It Goes Round, It Gets Older And Tighter And Older And Tighter, Until It Holds A Person Inside It Like A Fist Holds A Stick.

When People Say, Did You Always Want To Be A Writer?, I Have To Say No! I Always Was A Writer.

All Men Were Alien One To Another, At Times, Not Only Aliens.

Fire And Fear, Good Servants, Bad Lords.

Nothing Is Yours. It Is To Use. It Is To Share. If You Will Not Share It, You Cannot Use It.

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.

It Is Yin And Yang. Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness ... How Did It Go? Light, Dark. Fear, Courage. Cold, Warmth. Female, Male. It Is Yourself ... Both And One. A Shadow On Snow.

If Success In Selling Is My Primary Interest, I Am Not Primarily A Writer, But A Salesperson. If I Teach Success In Selling As The Writer's Primary Objective, I Am Not Teaching Writing; I'm Teaching, Or Pretending To Teach, The Production And Marketing Of A Commodity.

Truth, As Ever, Avoids The Stranger.

There's Seldom As Much Hurry As I Used To Think There Was.

In War Everybody Is A Prisoner.

Absolute Freedom Is Absolute Responsibility.

Absolute Freedom

To Have A Choice At All Is To Be Privileged.

The Explorer Who Will Not Come Back Or Send Back His Ships To Tell His Tale Is Not An Explorer, Only An Adventurer; And His Sons Are Born In Exile.

She'll Die.' 'aye. That's A Consequence Of Being Alive.

In The Airport, Luggage-laden People Rush Hither And Yon Through Endless Corridors, Like Souls To Each Of Whom The Devil Has Furnished A Different, Inaccurate Map Of The Escape Route From Hell.

How Can People Be Anything But Ignorant When Knowledge Isn't Saved, Isn't Taught?

There Have Been Great Societies That Did Not Use The Wheel, But There Have Been No Societies That Did Not Tell Stories.

Without War There Are No Heroes. What Harm Would That Be? Oh, Lavinia, What A Woman's Question That Is.

It Is A Terrible Thing, This Kindess That Human Beings Do Not Lose. Terrible, Because When We Are Finally Naked In The Dark And Cold, It Is All We Have. We Who Are So Rich, So Full Of Strength, We End Up With That Small Change. We Have Nothing Else To Give.

To See That Your Life Is A Story While You're In The Middle Of Living It May Be A Help To Living It Well.

What Good Is Power When You're Too Wise To Use It?

A Story Rises From The Springs Of Creation, From The Pure Will To Be; It Tells Itself; I Takes Its Own Course, Finds Its Own Way, Its Own Words; And The Writer's Job Is To Be Its Medium.

The Counsel Of The Dead Is Not Profitable To The Living.

They Can Send Death At Once, But Life Is Slower.

Sanity Returns (in Most Cases) When The Book Is Closed.

Our Model Of The Cosmos Must Be As Inexhaustible As The Cosmos. A Complexity That Includes Not Only Duration But Creation, Not Only Being But Becoming, Not Only Geometry But Ethics. It Is Not The Answer We Are After, But Only How To Ask The Question.

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