Background Image

...

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?

-Ursula K. Le Guin

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

I Know People, I

Ursula K. Le Guin

...

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?

Views: 6

Topic

More From Ursula K. Le Guin

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

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.

The Reader Can't Take Much For Granted In A Fiction Where The Scenery Can Eat The Characters.

Age And Illness Made One A Dualist

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.

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.

Great Self-destruction Follows Upon Unfounded Fear.

Self Destruction

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

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.

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

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

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.

Those Who Build Walls Are Their Own Prisoners. I'm Going To Go Fulfill My Proper Function In The Social Organism. I'm Going To Unbuild Walls.

The Sunlights Differ, But There Is Only One Darkness.

When You Work In Form, Be It A Sonnet Or Villanelle Or Whatever, The Form Is There And You Have To Fill It. And You Have To Find How To Make That Form Say What You Want To Say. But What You Find, Always--i Think Any Poet Who's Worked In Form Will Agree With Me--is That The Form Leads You To What You Want To Say.

In War Everybody Is A Prisoner.

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?

If Civilization Has An Opposite, It Is War.

There's Nothing Wrong With Me...except Acute Chronic Fear.

Is It The Gods Who Set This Fire In Our Hearts, Or Do We Each Make Our Fierce Desire Into A God?

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

I Never Knew Anybody . . . Who Found Life Simple. I Think A Life Or A Time Looks Simple When You Leave Out The Details.

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

Belief Is The Wound That Knowledge Heals.

I Am Living In A Nightmare, From Which From Time To Time I Wake In Sleep.

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.

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.

Sometimes You Must Go Against The Wheel's Turn.

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.

Go To Bed; Tired Is Stupid.

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

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.

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

Distrust Everything I Say. I Am Telling The Truth.

Telling The Truth

Truth, As Ever, Avoids The Stranger.

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 Literature Of The Emperor Penguin Is As Forbidding, As Inaccessible, As The Frozen Heart Of Antarctica Itself. Its Beauties May Be Unearthly, But They Are Not For Us.

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.

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

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

There's No Way To Use Power For Good.

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

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.

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?

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.

Writers Need To Learn Their Trade, And How To Negotiate The Increasingly Difficult Marketplace. The Trade Can Be Taught And Learned Just As The Craft Can. But A Workshop Where The Trade Is The Principal Focus Of Interest Is Not A Writing Workshop. It Is A Business Class.

Certainly The Effort To Remain Unchanged, Young, When The Body Gives So Impressive A Signal Of Change As The Menopause, Is Gallant; But It Is A Stupid, Self-sacrificial Gallantry, Better Befitting A Boy Of Twenty Than A Woman Of Forty-five Or Fifty. Let The Athletes Die Young And Laurel-crowned. Let The Soldiers Earn The Purple Hearts. Let Women Die Old, White-crowned, With Human Hearts.

It Is Useless Work That Darkens The Heart.

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

If You Deny Any Affinity With Another Person Or Kind Of Person, If You Declare It To Be Wholly Different From Yourself - As Men Have Done To Women, And Class Has Done To Class, And Nation Has Done To Nation - You May Hate It Or Deify It; But In Either Case You Have Denied Its Spiritual Equality And Its Human Reality. You Have Made It Into A Thing, To Which The Only Possible Relationship Is A Power Relationship. And Thus You Have Fatally Impoverished Your Own Reality.

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

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

Revolution Is Our Obligation: Our Hope Of Evolution.

No Man, No Power, Can Bind The Action Of Wizardry Or Still The Words Of Power. For They Are The Very Words Of Making, And One Who Could Silence Them Could Unmake The World.

Can True Function Arise From Basic Dysfunction?

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.

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.

Her Concern With Landscapes And Living Creatures Was Passionate. This Concern, Feebly Called, "the Love Of Nature" Seemed To Shevek To Be Something Much Broader Than Love. 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. It Was Strange To See Takver Take A Leaf Into Her Hand, Or Even A Rock. She Became An Extension Of It, It Of Her.

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.

Wrongs Done Could Not Be Righted, But At Least They Were Not Still Being Done.

All Makers Must Leave Room For Acts Of The Spirit.

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?

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.

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

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.

Do You Know How To Read?" "no. It Is One Of The Black Arts." He Nodded. "but A Useful One," He Said.

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

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.

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.

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.

Prose Writers Are Interested Mostly In Life And Commas.

The Earth Is Beautiful, And Bright, And Kindly, But That Is Not All. The Earth Is Also Terrible, And Dark, And Cruel. The Rabbit Shrieks Dying In The Green Meadows. The Mountains Clench Their Great Hands Full Of Hidden Fire. There Are Sharks In The Sea, And There Is Cruelty In Men's Eyes.

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

Ignorant Power Is A Bane!

The Old Knowledge Had Been Difficult But Not Distressing. It Had Been All Paradox And Myth, And It Had Made Sense. The New Knowledge Was All Fact And Reason, And It Made No Sense.

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.

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

Readers, After All, Are Making The World With You. You Give Them The Materials, But It's The Readers Who Build That World In Their Own Minds.

Meeting Writers Is Always So Disappointing. I Got Over Wanting To Meet Live Writers Quite A Long Time Ago. There Is This Terrific Book That Has Changed Your Life, And Then You Meet The Author, And He Has Shifty Eyes And Funny Shoes And He Won't Talk About Anything Except The Injustice Of The United States Income Tax Structure Toward People With Fluctuating Income, Or How To Breed Black Angus Cows, Or Something.

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

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.

I Don't Write Tracts, I Write Novels. I'm Not A Preacher, I'm A Fiction Writer.

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

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.

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

No, I Don't Mean Love, When I Say Patriotism. I Mean Fear. The Fear Of The Other. And Its Expressions Are Political, Not Poetical: Hate, Rivalry, Aggression.

Science Fiction Is Not Prescriptive; It Is Descriptive.

Science Fiction

Morning Comes Whether You Set The Alarm Or Not.

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

To Exhibit The Perfect Uselessness Of Knowing The Answer To The Wrong Question.

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

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.

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

What Is Love Of One's Country; Is It Hate Of One's Uncountry? Then It's Not A Good Thing. Is It Simply Self-love? That's A Good Thing, But One Musn't Make A Virtue Of It, Or A Profession...insofar As I Love Life, I Love [my Country], But That Sort Of Love Does Not Have A Boundary-line Of Hate. And Beyond That, I Am Ignorant, I Hope.

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

Dreams Take Short Cuts.

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.

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

She Obeys Me, But Only Because She Wants To. It's The Only Justification For Obedience, Ged Observed.

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

Infinite Are The Arguments Of Mages.

First Sentences Are Doors To Worlds.

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

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

Belief In The Lie Is The Life Of The Lie.

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.

You Fear Them Because You Fear Death, And Rightly: For Death Is Terrible And Must Be Feared,' The Mage Said...'and Life Is Also A Terrible Thing,' Ged Said, 'and Must Be Feared And Praised.

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.

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.

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

The Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness.

Stories Are What Death Thinks He Puts An End To. He Can't Understand That They End In Him, But They Don't End With Him.

It Is Not Altogether A Bad Thing To Have Criminal Ancestors. An Arsonist Grandfather May Bequeath One A Nose For Smelling Smoke.

Love Doesn't Just Sit There, Like A Stone; It Has To Be Made, Like Bread, Remade All The Time, Made New.

To Read And To Write. Some Writers Have To Be Told To Write. They Think Their Job Is To Meet Agents And Have Experiences And They Can Just Be Rich And Famous. Their Job Is To Write. Some Really Don't Realize That. And You Can't Write Unless You Read.

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

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.

The Same Old Hypocrisy. Life Is A Fight, And The Strongest Wins. All Civilization Does Is Hide The Blood And Cover Up The Hate With Pretty Words!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

True Understanding Is The Spur Of Genius

Sure, It's Simple, Writing For Kids... Just As Simple As Bringing Them Up.

The Great Authors Share Their Souls With Us- "literally.

Do You See, Arren, How An Act Is Not, As Young Men Think, Like A Rock That One Picks Up And Throws, And It Hits Or Misses, And That's The End Of It. When That Rock Is Lifted, The Earth Is Lighter; The Hand That Bears It Is Heavier. When It Is Thrown, The Circuits Of The Stars Respond, And Where It Strikes Or Falls The Universe Is Changed.

What Good Is Music? None ... And That Is The Point. To The World And Its States And Armies And Factories And Leaders, Music Says, 'you Are Irrelevant'; And, Arrogant And Gentle As A God, To The Suffering Man It Says Only, 'listen.' For Being Saved Is Not The Point. Music Saves Nothing. Merciful, Uncaring, It Denies And Breaks Down All The Shelters, The Houses Men Build For Themselves, That They May See The Sky.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

But It Doesn't Take A Thousand Men To Open A Door, My Lord." "it Might To Keep It Open.

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.

... The Habit Of Literature [is] The Best Defense Against Believing The Half-truths Of Ideologues And The Lies Of Demagogues.

A Man Does Not Make His Destiny: He Accepts It Or Denies It.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The Creative Adult Is The Child Who Has Survived.

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.

When I'm Writing I Don't Dream Much; It's Like The Dreaming Gets Used In The Writing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Artists Are People Who Are Not At All Interested In The Facts - Only In The Truth.

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.

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

We Have Been Civilized For A Thousand Millennia. We Have Histories Of Hundreds Of Those Millennia. We Have Tried Everything. Anarchism, In All Its Forms, With The Rest. But I Have Not Tried It. They Say There Is Nothing New Under Any Sun. But If Each Life Is Not New, Each Single Life, Then Why Are We Born?

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.

That I Was Not Dueling With The King, But Trying To Communicate With Him, Was Itself An Incommunicable Fact.

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

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.

In Many College English Courses The Words “myth” And “symbol” Are Given A Tremendous Charge Of Significance. You Just Ain’t No Good Unless You Can See A Symbol Hiding, Like A Scared Gerbil, Under Every Page. And In Many Creative Writing Course The Little Beasts Multiply, The Place Swarms With Them. What Does This Mean? What Does That Symbolize? What Is The Underlying Mythos? Kids Come Lurching Out Of Such Courses With A Brain Full Of Gerbils. And They Sit Down And Write A Lot Of Empty Pomposity, Under The Impression That That’s How Melville Did It.

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.

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.

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

I Gather That A Lot Of The "pots" In The Great Museum In Baghdad, Which We Allowed To Be Looted And Then Gutted, Are Now For Sale To The Highest Bidder On The Art And Archeology Black Market. This Is Good Capitalism, I Guess, While A Museum, Being A Public Trust And Accessible To All, Is Anticapitalist, Pretty Damn Near Socialist In Fact.

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

What Goes Too Long Unchanged Destroys Itself.

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.

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

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.

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.

Truth Is A Matter Of The Imagination.

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

Compare The Torrent And The Glacier. Both Get Where They Are Going.

Her Work, I Really Think Her Work Is Finding What Her Real Work Is And Doing It, Her Work, Her Own Work, Her Being Human, Her Being In The World.

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

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

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.

There Are Two Kinds Of Knowledge, Local And Universal.

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

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

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.

I Have No Control Over My Writing. I Have Lots Of Good Intentions, But No Control. There's A Story That Wants To Be Told.

To Hear, One Must Be Silent.

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.

And He Began To See The Truth, That Ged Had Neither Lost Nor Won But, Naming The Shadow Of His Death With His Own Name, Had Made Himself Whole: A Man Who, Knowing His Whole True Self, Cannot Be Used Or Possessed By Any Power Other Than Himself, And Whose Life Therefore Is Lived For Life's Sake And Never In The Service Of Ruin, Or Pain, Or Hatred, Or The Dark.

What Is More Arrogant Than Honesty?

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.

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

We Read Books To Find Out Who We Are.

Self Understanding

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.

To Break A Promise Is To Deny The Reality Of The Past. Therefore It Is To Deny The Hope Of A Real Future.

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

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

Not Good Enough

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.

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.

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

It's A Rare Gift, To Know Where You Need To Be, Before You've Been To All The Places You Don't Need To Be.

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

As Great Scientists Have Said And As All Children Know, It Is Above All By The Imagination That We Achieve Perception, And Compassion, And Hope.

Fiction Writers, At Least In Their Braver Moments, Do Desire The Truth: To Know It, Speak It, Serve It. But They Go About It In A Peculiar And Devious Way, Which Consists In Inventing Persons, Places, And Events Which Never Did And Never Will Exist Or Occur, And Telling About These Fictions In Detail And At Length And With A Great Deal Of Emotion, And Then When They Are Done Writing Down This Pack Of Lies, They Say, There! That's The Truth!

Trending Author

Leverett Saltonstall

Deborah Norville

Marian Anderson

Category