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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

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Even In The Obscure

Ursula K. Le Guin

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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.

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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?

Go To Bed; Tired Is Stupid.

Now They Came Back To Him, On This Night He Was Seventeen Years Old. All The Years And Places Of His Brief Broken Life Came Within Mind's Reach And Made A Whole Again. He Knew Once More, At Last, After This Long, Bitter, Waisted Time, Who He Was And Where He Was. But Where He Must Go In The Years To Come, That He Could Not See; And He Feared To See It.

Distrust Everything I Say. I Am Telling The Truth.

Telling The Truth

Do Remember, Though, That Unless You're A Playwright, The Result [dialogue] Isn't What You Want; It's Only An Element Of What You Want. Actors Embody And Re-create The Words Of Drama. In Fiction, A Tremendous Amount Of Story And Character May Be Given Through The Dialogue, But The Story-world And Its People Have To Be Created By The Storyteller. If There's Nothing In It But Disembodied Voices, Too Much Is Missing.

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

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.

Secondhand Experience Breaks Down A Block From The Car Lot.

Crankish Attacks On The Freedom To Read Are Common At Present. When Backed And Coordinated By Organized Groups, They Become Sinister.

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

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

Genre Is A Useful Concept Only When Used Not Evaluatively But Descriptively.

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

Owning Is Owing, Having Is Hoarding.

The Only Thing That Makes Life Possible Is Permanent, Intolerable Uncertainty; Not Knowing What Comes Next.

Living In A World That Is Valued Only As Gain, An Ever-expanding World-as-frontier That Has No Worth Of Its Own, No Fullness Of Its Own, You Live In Danger Of Losing Your Own Worth To Yourself. That's When You Begin To Listen To The Voices From The Other Side, And To Ask Questions Of Failure And The Dark.

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.

Honestly, Orthodoxy Concerns Me About As Much As It Concerns Your Average Jackrabbit. I Only Follow Rules That Take Me Where I Want To Go. If There Aren't Any Rules, I Make Up My Own And Follow Them Strictly.

The Pornography Of Violence Of Course Far Exceeds, In Volume And General Acceptance, Sexual Pornography, In This Puritan Land Of Ours. Exploiting The Apocalypse, Selling The Holocaust, Is A Pornography. For The Ultimate Selling Job On Ultimate Violence One Must Read Those Works Of Fiction Issued By Our Government As Manuals Of Civil Defense, In Which You Learn That There's Nothing To Be Afraid Of If You've Stockpiled Lots Of Dried Fruit.

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

Great Artists Make The Roads; Good Teachers And Good Companions Can Point Them Out. But There Ain't No Free Rides, Baby. No Hitchhiking. And If You Want To Strike Out In Any New Direction — You Go Alone. With A Machete In Your Hand And The Fear Of God In Your Heart.

The Fish In The Creek Said Nothing. Fish Never Do. Few People Know What Fish Think About Injustice, Or Anything Else.

Oh, Never And Forever Aren't For Mortals, Love. But We Won't Be Parted Till I Know It's Right That We Part.

Morality Is An Utterly Meaningless Term Unless Defined As The Good One Does To Others, The Fulfilling Of One's Function In The Sociopolitical Whole.

Abstractions About Right And Wrong, Whether They Are As Old As Thou Shalt Not Kill Or As Modern As Do Your Own Thing, Often Serve Only To Confuse And Weaken Genuine Moral Decision.

A Forest Ecology Is A Delicate One. If The Forest Perishes, Its Fauna May Go With It. The Athshean Word For World Is Also The Word For Forest.

Grieving, Like Being Blind, Is A Strange Business; You Have To Learn How To Do It. We Seek Company In Mourning, But After The Early Bursts Of Tears, After The Praises Have Been Spoken, And The Good Days Remembered, And The Lament Cried, And The Grave Closed, There Is No Company In Grief. It Is A Burden Borne Alone.

The Trouble Is That We Have A Bad Habit, Encouraged By Pedants And Sophisticates, Of Considering Happiness As Something Rather Stupid. Only Pain Is Intellectual, Only Evil Interesting. This Is The Treason Of The Artist: A Refusal To Admit The Banality Of Evil And The Terrible Boredom Of Pain.

It Was Men's Ambitions, They Said, That Had Perverted All The Arts To Ends Of Gain.

Before The Moon I Am, What A Woman Is, A Woman Of Power, A Woman's Power, Deeper Than The Roots Of Trees, Deeper Than The Roots Of Islands, Older Than The Making, Older Than The Moon.

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.

Paradise Is For Those Who Make Paradise.

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

Public Speaking Is Done In The Public Tongue, The National Or Tribal Language; And The Language Of Our Tribe Is The Men's Language. Of Course Women Learn It. We're Not Dumb. If You Can Tell Margaret Thatcher From Ronald Reagan, Or Indira Gandhi From General Somoza, By Anything They Say, Tell Me How. This Is A Man's World, So It Talks A Man's Language.

Hope Is A Slow Business.

Dragons Are More Dangerous, And A Good Deal Commoner, Than Bears. Fantasy Is Nearer To Poetry, To Mysticism, And To Insanity Than Naturalistic Fiction Is. It Is A Real Wilderness, And Those Who Go There Should Not Feel Too Safe.

Manipulated, One Manipulates Others.

Have You Never Thought How Danger Must Surround Power As Shadow Does Light?

Alone, No One Wins Freedom.

Besides, When You Say You're A Feminist It Annoys The Bigots And The Old Farts And The Prissy Ladies So Much, It's Kind Of Irresistible.

People Who Deny The Existence Of Dragons Are Often Eaten By Dragons. From Within.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

If One Believes That Words Are Acts, As I Do, Then One Must Hold Writers Responsible For What Their Words Do.

Almost Anything Carried To A Logical Extreme Becomes Depressing.

Men Who Fight Wars In Winter Don't Live Till Spring.

Infinite Are The Arguments Of Mages.

You Know, I Don't Think A Lot About Why One Book Connects With Its Readers And Another Doesn't. Probably Because I Don't Want To Start Thinking, "am I Popular?" I Spent Way Too Much Time Thinking About That In High School.

The Important Thing Is Not The Finding, It Is The Seeking, It Is The Devotion With Which One Spins The Wheel Of Prayer And Scripture, Discovering The Truth Little By Little.

Happiness Is Based On A Just Discrimination Of What Is Necessary, What Is Neither Necessary Nor Destructive, And What Is Destructive. In The Middle Category, However - That Of The Unnecessary But Undestructive, That Of Comfort, Luxury, Exuberance, Etc

Things Don't Have Purposes, As If The Universe Were A Machine, Where Every Part Has A Useful Function. What's The Function Of A Galaxy? I Don't Know If Our Life Has A Purpose And I Don't See That It Matters. What Does Matter Is That We're A Part. Like A Thread In A Cloth Or A Grass-blade In A Field. It Is And We Are. What We Do Is Like Wind Blowing On The Grass.

So The First Step Out Of Childhood Is Made All At Once, Without Looking Before Or Behind, Without Caution, And Nothing Held In Reserve.

We Live In Capitalism. Its Power Seems Inescapable. So Did The Divine Right Of Kings.

There Are No Right Answers To Wrong Questions.

Asking Questions

Questions And Answers

Even A Poet Cannot Get Everything Right.

Fantasy Is Probably The Oldest Literary Device For Talking About Reality.

For We Each Of Us Deserve Everything, Every Luxury That Was Ever Piled In The Tombs Of The Dead Kings, And We Each Of Us Deserve Nothing, Not A Mouthful Of Bread In Hunger. Have We Not Eaten While Another Starved? Will You Punish Us For That? Will You Reward Us For The Virtue Of Starving While Others Ate? No Man Earns Punishment, No Man Earns Reward. Free Your Mind Of The Idea Of Deserving, The Idea Of Earning, And You Will Begin To Be Able To Think.

There Are Very Real Differences Between Science Fiction And Realistic Fiction, Between Horror And Fantasy, Between Romance And Mystery. Differences In Writing Them, In Reading Them, In Criticizing Them. Vive Les Différences! They're What Gives Each Genre Its Singular Flavor And Savor, Its Particular Interest For The Reader - And The Writer.

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

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

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.

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

When You Light A Candle, You Also Cast A Shadow.

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

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.

I Don’t Think ‘science Fiction’ Is A Very Good Name For It, But It’s The Name That We’ve Got. It Is Different From Other Kinds Of Writing, I Suppose, So It Deserves A Name Of Its Own. But Where I Can Get Prickly And Combative Is, If I’m Just Called A Sci-fi Writer. I’m Not. I’m A Novelist And Poet. Don’t Shove Me Into Your Damn Pigeonhole, Where I Don’t Fit, Because I’m All Over. My Tentacles Are Coming Out Of The Pigeonhole In All Directions.

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?

To Me The Female Principle Is, Or At Least Historically Has Been, Basically Anarchic. It Values Order Without Constraint, Rule By Custom Not By Force. It Has Been The Male Who Enforces Order, Who Constructs Power Structures, Who Makes, Enforces, And Breaks Laws.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

No Matter How Intelligent A Man Is, He Can't See What He Doesn't Know How To See.

Civilized Man Says: I Am Self, I Am Master, All The Rest Is Other--outside, Below, Underneath, Subservient. I Own, I Use, I Explore, I Exploit, I Control. What I Do Is What Matters. What I Want Is What Matter Is For. I Am That I Am, And The Rest Is Women & Wilderness, To Be Used As I See Fit.

He Is Far Too Intelligent To Become Really Cerebral.

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.

A Scientist Can Pretend That His Work Isn't Himself, It's Merely The Impersonal Truth. An Artist Can't Hide Behind The Truth. He Can't Hide Anywhere.

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.

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.

I Was In Too Much Haste, And Now Have No Time Left. I Traded All The Sunlight And The Cities And The Distant Lands For A Handful Of Power, For A Shadow, For The Dark.

He Was Appalled By The Examination System, When It Was Explained To Him, He Could Not Imagine A Greater Detterent To The Natural Wish To Learn Than This Pattern Of Cramming In Information And Disgorging It On Demand.

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

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.

But It Is One Thing To Read About Dragons And Another To Meet Them.

If Eternity Had A Season, It Would Be Midsummer. Autumn, Winter, Spring Are All Change And Passage, But At The Height Of Summer The Year Stands Poised. It's Only A Passing Moment, But Even As It Passes The Heart Knows It Cannot Change.

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

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.

The Thing About Working With Time, Instead Of Against It, He Thought, Is That It Is Not Wasted. Even Pain Counts.

If I Had To Pick A Hero, It Would Be Charles Darwin--the Size Of His Mind, Which Included All That Scientific Curiosity And Knowledge Seeking, And The Ability To Put It All Together. There Is A Genuine Spirituality About Darwin's Thinking.

Growing Up During World War Ii Certainly Affected My Whole View Of Life, But I Hardly Know How, It Goes So Deep. What's Hard To Explain Now Is That, Though We Were Never Invaded, And Bombed Only Once And Ineffectively On The Coast Of Oregon, Everybody In The Country Was In That War. Everything We Did Was Influenced By It - Eating, Traveling, Dressing, Thinking - Everything In Daily Life.

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.

As A Writer, You Are Free.

Belief In The Lie Is The Life Of The Lie.

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

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

A Wrong That Cannot Be Repaired Must Be Transcended.

Greed Puts Out The Sun.

Success Is Somebody Else's Failure.

There's No Way To Use Power For Good.

What Is An Anarchist? One Who, Choosing, Accepts The Responsibility Of Choice.

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.

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.

Time Has Two Aspects. There Is The Arrow, The Running River, Without Which There Is No Change, No Progress, Or Direction, Or Creation. And There Is The Circle Or The Cycle, Without Which There Is Chaos, Meaningless Succession Of Instants, A World Without Clocks Or Seasons Or Promises.

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.

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.

A Writer Is A Person Who Cares What Words Mean, What They Say, How They Say It. Writers Know Words Are Their Way Towards Truth And Freedom, And So They Use Them With Care, With Thought, With Fear, With Delight. By Using Words Well They Strengthen Their Souls. Story-tellers And Poets Spend Their Lives Learning That Skill And Art Of Using Words Well. And Their Words Make The Souls Of Their Readers Stronger, Brighter, Deeper.

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

There Are Souls, He Thought, Whose Umbilicus Has Never Been Cut. They Never Got Weaned From The Universe. They Do Not Understand Death As An Enemy; They Look Forward To Rotting And Turning Into Humus.

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.

Manhood Is Patience. Mastery Is Nine Time Patience

Animals Do Neither Good Nor Evil. They Do As They Must Do.we May Call What They Do Harmful Or Useful, But Good And Evil Belong To Us, Who Chose To Choose What We Do. [. . .] The Animals Need Only Be And Do.we're Yoked, And They're Free. So To Be With An Animal Is To Know A Little Freedom.

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

The Wise Needn't Ask, The Fool Asks In Vain.

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.

What Is A Woman's Power Then?" She Asked. "i Don't Think We Know." "when Has A Woman Power Because She's A Woman? With Her Children, I Suppose. For A While..." "in Her House, Maybe." She Looked Around The Kitchen. "but The Doors Are Shut," She Said, "the Doors Are Locked." "because You're Valuable." "oh Yes. We're Precious. So Long As We're Powerless.

In That Moment Ged Understood The Singing Of The Bird, And The Language Of The Water Falling In The Basin Of The Fountain, And The Shape Of The Clouds, And The Beginning And End Of The Wind That Stirred The Leaves; It Seemed To Him That He Himself Was A Word Spoken By The Sunlight.

The End Justifies The Means. But What If There Never Is An End? All We Have Is Means.

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

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

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

There's A Great Fear Of The Imagination. It's A Dangerous Thing. It's Out Of Control, It's Subversive.

Dangerous Things

A Man Wants His Virility Regarded. A Woman Wants Her Femininity Appreciated, However Indirect And Subtle The Indications Of Regard And Appreciation. [here] One Is Respected And Judged Only As A Human Being. It Is An Appalling Experience.

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

Desire For Power

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

Any Human Power Can Be Resisted And Changed By Human Beings

I Think Hard Times Are Coming. We Will Need Writers Who Can Remember Freedom. Poets, Visionaries, The Realists Of A Larger Reality.

A Dangerous Book Will Always Be In Danger From Those It Threatens With The Demand That They Question Their Assumptions. They'd Rather Hang On To The Assumptions And Ban The Book.

No Darkness Lasts Forever. And Even There, There Are Stars.

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.

Well, We Think That Time "passes," Flows Past Us, But What If It Is We Who Move Forward, From Past To Future, Always Discovering The New? It Would Be A Little Like Reading A Book, You See. The Book Is All There, All At Once, Between Its Covers. But If You Want To Read The Story And Understand It, You Must Begin With The First Page, And Go Forward, Always In Order. So The Universe Would Be A Very Great Book, And We Would Be Very Small Readers.

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.

Where There's Property, There's Theft.

Can True Function Arise From Basic Dysfunction?

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.

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.

Truth Is A Matter Of The Imagination.

Elegance Is A Small Price To Pay For Enlightenment, And I Was Glad To Pay It.

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.

Those Who Build Walls Are Their Own Prisoners.

One Must Work With Time And Not Against It.

It's Probably Simply A Matter Of Temperament That I Never Stopped To Wonder If I Could "match" What I Had Done, Never Choked Off My Writing By Competing With Myself, Or With Anybody Else For That Matter. My Ambition Was Absolutely Centered On The Work Itself, Never On What It Would Bring Me, Or "who" It Would Make Me. I Never Cared About That At All.

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

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.

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

If A Book Told You Something When You Were Fifteen, It Will Tell You It Again When You're Fifty, Though You May Understand It So Differently That It Seems You're Reading A Whole New Book.

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.

Science Fiction Is Not Predictive; It Is Descriptive.... Prediction Is The Business Of Prophets, Clairvoyants, And Futurologists. It Is Not The Business Of Novelists. A Novelist's Business Is Lying.... Open Your Eyes; Listen, Listen. That Is What The Novelists Say. But They Don't Tell You What You Will See And Hear. All They Can Tell You Is What They Have Seen And Heard, In Their Time In This World, A Third Of It Spent In Sleep And Dreaming, Another Third Of It Spent In Telling Lies.

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

Virginity Is Now A Mere Preamble Or Waiting Room To Be Got Out Of As Soon As Possible; It Is Without Significance. Old Age Is Similarly A Waiting Room, Where You Go After Life's Over And Wait For Cancer Or A Stroke. The Years Before And After The Menstrual Years Are Vestigial: The Only Meaningful Condition Left To Women Is That Of Fruitfulness.

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.

If You Deny Any Affinity With Another Person Or Kind Of Person, If You Declare It To Be Wholly Different From Yourself

I Write With All My Heart

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

Changing Your Life

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

What Goes Too Long Unchanged Destroys Itself.

Great Artists Make The Roads; Good Teachers And Good Companions Can Point Them Out. But There Ain't No Free Rides, Baby.

He Had Grown Up In A Country Run By Politicians Who Sent The Pilots To Man The Bombers To Kill The Babies To Make The World Safer For Children To Grow Up In.

Other People's Stories May Become Part Of Your Own, The Foundation Of It, The Ground It Goes On.

My World, My Earth Is A Ruin. A Planet Spoiled By The Human Species. We Multiplied And Fought And Gobbled Until There Was Nothing Left, And Then We Died. We Controlled Neither Appetite Nor Violence; We Did Not Adapt. We Destroyed Ourselves. But We Destroyed The World First.

We Decided That It Was No Good Asking What Is The Meaning Of Life, Because Life Isn't An Answer, Life Is The Question, And You, Yourself, Are The Answer.

Meaning Of Life

My Great-aunt. . . . Said Nobody Under 18 Had Any Business Reading Dickens. . . . She Was Right.

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.

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.

Great Self-destruction Follows Upon Unfounded Fear.

Self Destruction

Nothing Remains The Same From One Moment To The Next, You Can't Step Into The Same River Twice. Life--evolution--the Whole Universe Of Space/time, Matter/energy--existence Itself--is Essentially Change.

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.

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

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.

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.

Fantasy Is A Literature Particularly Useful For Embodying And Examining The Real Difference Between Good And Evil. In An America Where Our Reality May Seem Degraded To Posturing Patriotism And Self-righteous Brutality, Imaginative Literature Continues To Question What Heroism Is, To Examine The Roots Of Power, And To Offer Moral Alternatives. Imagination Is The Instrument Of Ethics. There Are Many Metaphors Besides Battle, Many Choices Besides War, And Most Ways Of Doing Good Do Not, In Fact, Involve Killing Anybody. Fanstasy Is Good At Thinking About Those Other Ways.

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

Men Call Women Faithless, Changeable, And Though They Say It In Jealousy Of Their Own Ever-threatened Sexual Honor, There Is Some Truth In It. We Can Change Our Life, Our Being; No Matter What Our Will Is, We Are Changed. As The Moon Changes Yet Is One, So We Are Virgin, Wife, Mother, Grandmother. For All Their Restlessness, Men Are Who They Are; Once They Put On The Man's Toga They Will Not Change Again; So They Make A Virtue Of That Rigidity And Resist Whatever Might Soften It And Set Them Free.

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

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.

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

We Read Books To Find Out Who We Are. What Other People, Real Or Imaginary, Do And Think And Feel... Is An Essential Guide To Our Understanding Of What We Ourselves Are And May Become.

I Talk About The Gods, I Am An Atheist. But I Am An Artist Too, And Therefore A Liar. Distrust Everything I Say. I Am Telling The Truth.

Morning Comes Whether You Set The Alarm Or Not.

It Is Hard To Swear When Sex Is Not Dirty And Blasphemy Does Not Exist.

The Label Ya Actually Means Nothing Except That The Protagonists, Or Some Of Them, Are Young. Publishers Like It Because It Is A Secure Marketing Niche. But The Cost Of Security Is Exclusion From Literary Consideration.

The Individual Cannot Bargain With The State. The State Recognizes No Coinage But Power: And It Issues The Coins Itself.

For Fantasy Is True, Of Course. It Isn't Factual, But It Is True. Children Know That. Adults Know It Too, And That Is Precisely Why Many Of Them Are Afraid Of Fantasy. They Know That Its Truth Challenges, Even Threatens, All That Is False, All That Is Phony, Unnecessary, And Trivial In The Life They Have Let Themselves Be Forced Into Living. They Are Afraid Of Dragons, Because They Are Afraid Of Freedom.

I Hope You Are Never Victims, But I Hope You Have No Power Over Other People.

Power Over Others

I Have Become Very Critical Of The Whole Book Award System And Could Preach On That Subject For Quite A While, But I Do Know What An Award Can Mean To A Writer Early In Her Career. It Can Give An Essential Validation.

Literacy Is So You Can Read The Operating Instructions.

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

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.

Death And Life Are The Same Thing-like The Two Sides Of My Hand, The Palm And The Back. And Still The Palm And The Back Are Not The Same...they Can Be Neither Separated, Nor Mixed.

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

I Think There Is No Way To Write About Being Alone. To Write Is To Tell Something To Somebody To Communicate To Others. . . . Solitude Is Noncommunication, The Absence Of Others, The Presence Of A Self Sufficient To Itself.

The Law Of Evolution Is That The Strongest Survives!' 'yes, And The Strongest, In The Existence Of Any Social Species, Are Those Who Are Most Social. In Human Terms, Most Ethical...there Is No Strength To Be Gained From Hurting One Another. Only Weakness.

To Oppose Something Is To Maintain It... You Must Go Somewhere Else; You Must Have Another Goal; Then You Walk A Different Road.

The Greatest Religious Problem Today Is How To Be Both A Mystic And A Militant; In Other Words How To Combine The Search For An Expansion Of Inner Awareness With Effective Social Action, And How To Feel One's True Identity In Both.

I Am No More Lonely Than The Loon On The Pond That Laughs So Loud.

Anyhow They’re Always Exceptions. But Most Women, Their Only Relationship To A Man Is Having. Either Owning Or Being Owned.

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.

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