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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.

-Ursula K. Le Guin

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Growing Up During World

Ursula K. Le Guin

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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.

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Sometimes One's Very Angry And Preaches, But I Know That To Clinch A Point Is To Close It. To Leave The Reader Free To Decide What Your Work Means, That's The Real Art; It Makes The Work Inexhaustible.

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.

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.

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

At This Point, Realism Is Perhaps The Least Adequate Means Of Understanding Or Portraying The Incredible Realities Of Our Existence.

What Is A Body That Casts No Shadow? Nothing, A Formlessness, Two-dimensional, A Comic-strip Character. If I Deny My Own Profound Relationship With Evil I Deny My Own Reality. I Cannot Do, Or Make; I Can Only Undo, Unmake.

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

If Civilization Has An Opposite, It Is War.

Capitalism’s Grow-or-die Imperative Stands Radically At Odds With Ecology’s Imperative Of Interdependence And Limit. The Two Imperatives Can No Longer Coexist With Each Other; Nor Can Any Society Founded On The Myth That They Can Be Reconciled Hope To Survive. Either We Will Establish An Ecological Society Or Society Will Go Under For Everyone, Irrespective Of His Or Her Status.

I Came Into Science Fiction At A Very Good Time, When The Doors Were Getting Thrown Open To All Kinds Of More Experimental Writing, More Literary Writing, Riskier Writing. It Wasn't All Imitation Heinlein Or Asimov. And Of Course, Women Were Creeping In, Infiltrating. Infesting The Premises.

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

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.

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 Not Human To Be Without Shame And Without Desire.

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

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.

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

Everything Gives Way Before The Recurring Torment And Festivity Of Passion.

My Real Children Starts Quietly, Then Suddenly Takes You On Two Roller-coaster Rides At Once, Swooping Dizzily Through A Double Panorama And Ending In A Sort Of Super Sophie's Choice. A Daring Tour De Force.

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.

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

The Use Of Imaginative Fiction Is To Deepen Your Understanding Of Your World, And Your Fellow Men, And Your Own Feelings, And Your Destiny.

All Makers Must Leave Room For The Acts Of The Spirit. But They Have To Work Hard And Carefully, And Wait Patiently, To Deserve Them.

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

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 Hunger Of A Dragon Is Slow To Wake, But Hard To Sate.

But Now His Dry And Silent Grieving For His Lost Wife Must End, For There She Stood, The Fierce, Recalcitrant, And Fragile Stranger, Forever To Be Won Again.

The Airport Bookstore Did Not Sell Books, Only Bestsellers, Which Sita Dulip Cannot Read Without Risking A Severe Systemic Reaction.

You Must Come To Terms With Your Wholeself. The Wholeness Which Exceeds All Our Virtue And All Our Vice.

To Learn A Belief Without The Belief Is To Sing A Song Without The Tune.

As A Writer, You Are Free.

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.

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

Science Fiction Is Not Prescriptive; It Is Descriptive.

Science Fiction

It Is A Real Wilderness, And Those Who Go There Should Not Feel Too Safe.

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.

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.

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

If You Evade Suffering You Also Evade The Chance Of Joy. Pleasure You May Get, Or Pleasures, But You Will Not Be Fulfilled. You Will Not Know What It Is To Come Home.

We Will Not Know Our Own Injustice If We Cannot Imagine Justice. We Will Not Be Free If We Do Not Imagine Freedom. We Cannot Demand That Anyone Try To Attain Justice And Freedom Who Has Not Had A Chance To Imagine Them As Attainable.

There Are No Right Answers To Wrong Questions.

Asking Questions

Questions And Answers

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

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

To Have A Choice At All Is To Be Privileged.

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.

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

True Myths May Serve For Thousands Of Years As An Inexhaustible Source Of Intellectual Speculation, Religious Joy, Ethical Inquiry, And Artistic Renewal. The Real Mystery Is Not Destroyed By Reason. The Fake One Is. You Look At It And It Vanishes. You Look At The Blonde Hero-really Look-and He Turns Into A Gerbil. But You Look At Apollo, And He Looks Back At You. The Poet Rilke Looked At A Statue Of Apollo About Fifty Years Ago, And Apollo Spoke To Him. "you Must Change Your Life," He Said. When The True Myth Rises Into Consciousness, That Is Always Its Message. You Must Change Your Life.

Any Human Power Can Be Resisted And Changed By Human Beings

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

Writers Are Egotists. All Artists Are. They Can’t Be Altruists And Get Their Work Done. And Writers Love To Whine About The Solitude Of The Author’s Life, And Lock Themselves Into Cork-lined Rooms Or Droop Around In Bars In Order To Whine Better. But Although Most Writing Is Done In Solitude, I Believe That It Is Done, Like All The Arts, For An Audience. That Is To Say, With An Audience. All The Arts Are Performance Arts, Only Some Of Them Are Sneakier About It Than Others.

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.

The Model Of Modern Western Civilization Is The Virus: The Pure Bit Of Information, Which Turns Its Environment Into Endless Reproductions Of Itself.

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.

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.

Realism Is A Very Sophisticated Form Of Literature, A Very Grown-up One. And That May Be Its Weakness. But Fantasy Seems To Be Eternal And Omnipresent And Always Attractive To Kids.

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.

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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.

Whenever They Tell Me Children Want This Sort Of Book And Children Need This Sort Of Writing, I Am Going To Smile Politely And Shut My Earlids. I Am A Writer, Not A Caterer. There Are Plenty Of Caterers. But What Children Most Want And Need Is What We And They Don't Know They Want And Don't Think They Need, And Only Writers Can Offer It To Them.

Love's Just One Of The Ways Through, And It Can Go Wrong, And Miss. Pain Never Misses. But Therefore We Don't Have Much Choice About Enduring It! We Will, Whether We Want To Or Not.

One Man May As Easily Destroy, As Govern: Be King Or Anti-king.

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.

Great Self-destruction Follows Upon Unfounded Fear.

Self Destruction

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

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.

Science Fiction - And The Correct Shortcut Is 'sf' - Uses Actual Scientific Facts Or Theories For The Source Ideas Or Framework Of The Story. It Has Some Scientific Content, However Speculative. If It Breaks A Law Of Physics, It Knows It's Doing So And Follows Up The Consequences. If It Invents A Society Of Aliens, It Does So With Some Respect For And Knowledge Of The Social Sciences And What You Might Call Social Probabilities. And Some Of It Is Literarily Self-aware Enough To Treat Its Metaphors As Metaphors.

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.

In The Tale, In The Telling, We Are All One Blood.

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.

A Child Free From The Guilt Of Ownership And The Burden Of Economic Competition Will Grow Up With The Will To Do What Needs Doing And The Capacity For Joy In Doing It. It Is Useless Work That Darkens The Heart. The Delight Of The Nursing Mother, Of The Scholar, Of The Successful Hunter, Of The Good Cook, Of The Skilful Maker, Of Anyone Doing Needed Work And Doing It Well, - This Durable Joy Is Perhaps The Deepest Source Of Human Affection And Of Sociality As A Whole.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

There Is Neither Source Nor End, For All Things Are In The Center Of Time. As All The Stars May Be Reflected In A Round Raindrop Falling In The Night: So Too Do All The Stars Reflect The Raindrop. There Is Neither Darkness Nor Death, For All Things Are, In The Light Of The Moment, And Their End And Their Beginning Are One.

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

It Was Easy To Share When There Was Enough, Even Barely Enough, To Go Round. But When There Was Not Enough? Then Force Entered In; Might Making Right; Power, And Its Tool, Violence, And Its Most Devoted Ally, The Averted Eye.

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

Nothing Said In Words Ever Came Out Quite Even. Things In Words Got Twisted And Ran Together, Instead Of Staying Straight And Fitting Together.

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

One Must Work With Time And Not Against It.

Skill In Writing Frees You To Write What You Want To Write. It May Also Show You What You Want To Write. Craft Enables Art.

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.

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

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.

Having One King, One God, One Belief, They Can Act Single-mindedly.

There Was A Wall. It Did Not Look Important. It Was Built Of Uncut Rocks Roughly Mortared. An Adult Could Look Right Over It, And Even A Child Could Climb It. Where It Crossed The Roadway, Instead Of Having A Gate It Degenerated Into Mere Geometry, A Line, An Idea Of Boundary. But The Idea Was Real. It Was Important. For Seven Generations There Had Been Nothing In The World More Important Than That Wall. Like All Walls It Was Ambiguous, Two-faced. What Was Inside It And What Was Outside It Depended Upon Which Side Of It You Were On.

There's No Way To Use Power For Good.

And I Speak Of Spiritual Suffering! Of People Seeing Their Talent, Their Work, Their Lives Wasted. Of Good Minds Submitting To Stupid Ones. Of Strength And Courage Strangled By Envy, Greed For Power, Fear Of Change. Change Is Freedom, Change Is Life

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.

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

Fire And Fear, Good Servants, Bad Lords.

It Is Good To Have An End To Journey Towards; But It Is The Journey That Matters, In The End.

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.

In So Far As One Denies What Is, One Is Possessed By What Is Not, The Compulsions, The Fantasies, The Terrors That Flock To Fill The Void.

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

All Times Are Changing Times, But Ours Is One Of Massive, Rapid Moral And Mental Transformation. Archetypes Turn Into Millstones, Large Simplicities Get Complicated, Chaos Becomes Elegant, And What Everybody Knows Is True Turns Out To Be What Some People Used To Think.

Times Are Changing

A Writer Either Speaks To Adults And Bores Kids, Or Speaks To Kids And Upsets Adults.

To Be Whole Is To Be Part; True Voyage Is Return.

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

The Only Questions That Really Matter Are The Ones You Ask Yourself.

Asking Yourself Questions

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

Truth, As Ever, Avoids The Stranger.

If Women Had Power, What Would Men Be But Women Who Can't Bear Children? And What Would Women Be But Men Who Can?" "hah!" Went Tenar; And Presently, With Some Cunning, She Said, "haven't There Been Queens? Weren't They Women Of Power?" "a Queen's Only A She-king," Said Ged. She Snorted. "i Mean, Men Give Her Power. They Let Her Use Their Power. But It Isn't Hers, Is It? It Isn't Because She's A Woman That She's Powerful, But Despite It.

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.

Life Rises Out Of Death, Death Rises Out Of Life; In Being Opposite They Yearn To Each Other, They Give Birth To Each Other And Are Forever Reborn. And With Them, All Is Reborn, The Flower Of The Apple Tree, The Light Of The Stars. In Life Is Death. In Death Is Rebirth. What Then Is Life Without Death? Life Unchanging, Everlasting, Eternal?-what Is It But Death-death Without Rebirth?

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.

To Oppose Something Is To Maintain It.

Law Of Attraction

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

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.

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

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

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

Fantasy Is Not Antirational, But Pararational; Not Realistic But Surrealistic, A Heightening Of Reality. In Freud's Terminology, It Employs Primary Not Secondary Process Thinking. It Employs Archetypes Which, As Jung Warned Us, Are Dangerous Things. Fantasy Is Nearer To Poetry, To Mysticism, And To Insanity Than Naturalistic Fiction Is. It Is A Wilderness, And Those Who Go There Should Not Feel Too Safe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Injustice Makes The Rules, And Courage Breaks Them.

Can True Function Arise From Basic Dysfunction?

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.

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.

Genre Fiction Was Looked At As A Ghetto, But I Wonder Now If Realist Fiction, Sealing Itself Off In The Glum Suburbs Of A Dysfunctional Society, Denying The Use Of Imagination, Was The Ghetto.

First Sentences Are Doors To Worlds.

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.

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

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

Power Over Others

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

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

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

What The Brain Does By Itself Is Infinitely More Fascinating And Complex Than Any Response It Can Make To Chemical Stimulation.

The World Is In Balance . To Light A Candle Is To Cast A Shadow.

Even A Poet Cannot Get Everything Right.

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.

The Danger In Trying To Do Good Is That The Mind Comes To Confuse The Intent Of Goodness With The Act Of Doing Things Well.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

The Notion That A Story Has A Message Assumes That It Can Be Reduced To A Few Abstract Words, Neatly Summarized In A School Or College Examination Paper Or A Brisk Critical Review.

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.

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?

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

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.

Belief In The Lie Is The Life Of The Lie.

I Know People, I Know Towns, Farms, Hills And Rivers And Rocks, I Know How The Sun At Sunset In Autumn Falls On The Side Of A Certain Plowland In The Hills; But What Is The Sense Of Giving A Boundary To All That, Of Giving A Name And Ceasing To Love Where The Name Ceases To Apply?

Truth Is A Matter Of The Imagination. The Soundest Fact May Fail Or Prevail In The Style Of Its Telling: Like That Singular Organic Jewel Of Our Seas, Which Grows Brighter As One Woman Wears It And, Worn By Another, Dulls And Goes To Dust.

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

A Panda Walks Into A Tea Room And Ordered A Salad And Ate It. Then It Pulled Out A Pistol, Shot The Man In The Next Table Dead, And Walked Out. Everyone Rushed After It, Shouting "stop! Stop! Why Did You Do That?" "becuase I Am A Panda," Said The Panda. "that's What Pandas Do. If You Don't Believe Me, Look In The Dictionary." So They Looked In The Dictionary And Sure Enough They Found Panda: Racoon-like Animal Of Asia. Eats Shoots And Leaves.

Infinite Are The Arguments Of Mages.

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

Prose Writers Are Interested Mostly In Life And Commas.

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

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

Almost Anything Carried To A Logical Extreme Becomes Depressing.

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

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.

The Law Of Evolution Is That The Strongest Survives.

Little Mirrors Were Attached To The Front Of Their Cars, At Which They Glanced To See Where They Had Been; Then They Stared Ahead Again. I Had Thought That Only Beetles Had This Delusion Of Progress.

Most Civilisations, Perhaps, Look Shinier In General Terms And From Several Light-years Away.

Music Is Another Way Of Thinking, Or Maybe Thinking Is Another Kind Of Music.

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.

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.

The Artist Deals With What Cannot Be Said In Words. The Artist Whose Medium Is Fiction Does This In Words. The Novelist Says In Words What Cannot Be Said In Words.

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

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

Manipulated, One Manipulates 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.

Love Is The True Condition Of Human Life.

But Need Alone Is Not Enough To Set Power Free: There Must Be Knowledge.

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

Primitiveness And Civilization Are Degrees Of The Same Thing. If Civilization Has An Opposite, It Is War.

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

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

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.

Living, Being In The World, Was A Much Greater And Stranger Thing Than She Had Ever Dreamed.

The Story Is Not In The Plot But In The Telling.

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

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.

Only In Silence The Word, Only In Dark The Light, Only In Dying Life: Bright The Hawk's Flight On The Empty Sky.

All Makers Must Leave Room For Acts Of The Spirit.

The Historic Function Of A Senator From Oregon Is To Drive All The Other Senators Mad.

We Broke The World To Make It Whole.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This Is. And Thou Art. There Is No Safety. There Is No End. The Word Must Be Heard In Silence. There Must Be Darkness To See The Stars. The Dance Is Always Danced Above The Hollow Place, Above The Terrible Abyss.

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

Age And Illness Made One A Dualist

What's Wrong With Men?" Tenar Inquired Cautiously. As Cautiously, Lowering Her Voice, Moss Replied, "i Don't Know, My Dearie. I've Thought On It. Often I've Thought On It. The Best I Can Say It Is Like This. A Man's In His Skin, See, Like A Nut In Its Shell." She Held Up Her Long, Bent, Wet Fingers As If Holding A Walnut. "it's Hard And Strong, That Shell, And It's All Full Of Him. Full Of Grand Man-meat, Man-self. And That's All. That's All There Is. It's All Him And Nothing Else, Inside.

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.

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Saul Perlmutter

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