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I Think Hard Times Are Coming When We Will Be Wanting The Voices Of Writers Who Can See Alternatives To How We Live Now And Can See Through Our Fear-stricken Society And Its Obsessive Technologies To Other Ways Of Being, And Even Imagine Some Real Grounds For Hope. We Will Need Writers Who Can Remember Freedom. Poets, Visionaries-the Realists Of A Larger Reality.

-Ursula K. Le Guin

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I Think Hard Times

Ursula K. Le Guin

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I Think Hard Times Are Coming When We Will Be Wanting The Voices Of Writers Who Can See Alternatives To How We Live Now And Can See Through Our Fear-stricken Society And Its Obsessive Technologies To Other Ways Of Being, And Even Imagine Some Real Grounds For Hope. We Will Need Writers Who Can Remember Freedom. Poets, Visionaries-the Realists Of A Larger Reality.

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

If Civilization Has An Opposite, It Is War.

The Book Itself Is A Curious Artifact, Not Showy In Its Technology But Complex And Extremely Efficient: A Really Neat Little Device, Compact, Often Very Pleasant To Look At And Handle, That Can Last Decades, Even Centuries. It Doesn't Have To Be Plugged In, Activated, Or Performed By A Machine; All It Needs Is Light, A Human Eye, And A Human Mind. It Is Not One Of A Kind, And It Is Not Ephemeral. It Lasts. It Is Reliable.

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.

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

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.

Dreams Take Short Cuts.

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

He Is Far Too Intelligent To Become Really Cerebral.

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.

Owning Is Owing, Having Is Hoarding.

What Sane Person Could Live In This World And Not Be Crazy?

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

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

Resistance And Change Often Begin In Art, And Very Often In Our Art - The Art Of Words.

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

Belief In The Lie Is The Life Of The Lie.

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

Any Human Power Can Be Resisted And Changed By Human Beings

The Quality Of The Will To Power Is, Precisely, Growth. Achievement Is Its Cancellation. To Be, The Will To Power Must Increase With Each Fulfillment, Making The Fulfillment Only A Step To A Further One. The Vaster The Power Gained The Vaster The Appetite For More.

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.

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

Truth Is A Matter Of The Imagination.

It Is Useless Work That Darkens The Heart.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

Power Over Others

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

I Suppose The Most Important Thing, The Heaviest Single Factor In One's Life, Is Whether One's Born Male Or Female. In Most Societies It Determines One's Expectations, Activities, Outlook, Ethics, Manners - Almost Everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic Usages. Clothing. Even Food. Women... Women Tend To Eat Less... It's Extremely Hard To Separate The Innate Differences From The Learned Ones. Even Where Women Participate Equally With Men In The Society, They Still After All Do All The Childbearing, And So Most Of The Child-rearing.

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

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

I Do Try To Separate My Personal Activism - Showing Up At A Demonstration Or Something - From What I Write.

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

You Have To Help Another Person. But It's Not Right To Play God With Masses Of People. To Be God You Have To Know What You're Doing. And To Do Any Good At All, Just Believing You're Right And Your Motives Are Good Isn't Enough.

Can True Function Arise From Basic Dysfunction?

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.

I Believe That Maturity Is Not An Outgrowing, But A Growing Up: That An Adult Is Not A Dead Child, But A Child Who Survived.

What's Needed In This Case Is Conscious And Serious Practice In Hearing, And Using, And Being Used By, Other People's Voices.

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.

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.

I Don't Believe That A Writer 'gets' (takes Into The Head) An 'idea' (some Sort Of Mental Object) 'from' Somewhere, And Then Turns It Into Words, And Writes Them On Paper. At Least In My Experience, It Doesn't Work That Way. The Stuff Has To Be Transformed Into Oneself, It Has To Be Composted, Before It Can Grow Into A Story.

If Science Fiction Is The Mythology Of Modern Technology, Then Its Myth Is Tragic.

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.

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.

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.

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

Nobody Who Says, ‘i Told You So’ Has Ever Been, Or Will Ever Be, A Hero.

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.

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

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

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 Question Is Always The Same With A Dragon: Will He Talk With You Or Will He Eat You?

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.

There Is No Kingdom Like The Forests.

The Bond Between True Lovers Is As Close As We Come To What Endures Forever.

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

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

The Living Tongue That Tells The Word, The Living Ear That Hears It, Bind And Bond Us In The Communion We Long For In The Silence Of Our Inner Solitude.

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.

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

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.

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.

If It Were Proven That There Is No God There Would Be No Religion. ...but Also If It Were Proven That There Is A God, There Would Be No Religion.

At The Pit's Bottom Is No Anger.

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

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.

And Though I Came To Forget Or Regret All I Have Ever Done, Yet Would I Remember That Once I Saw The Dragons Aloft On The Wind At Sunset Above The Western Isles; And I Would Be Content.

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

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

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

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.

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

The Law Of Evolution Is That The Strongest Survives.

Not Even Need And Love Can Defeat Fate.

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.

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

My Imagination Makes Me Human And Makes Me A Fool; It Gives Me All The World, And Exiles Me From It.

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.

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.

Ah, Genre. A Word Only A Frenchman Could Love.

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.

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

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.

In General She Had Found That The Main Drawback In Being A Man Was That Conversations Were Less Interesting.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

A Wrong That Cannot Be Repaired Must Be Transcended.

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.

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

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.

George, It's Impossible To Correct A Defective Reality-orientation Overnight.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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!

Statesmen Remember Things Selectively.

I Think The Mystery Of Art Lies In This, That Artists’ Relationship Is Essentially With Their Work — Not With Power, Not With Profit, Not With Themselves, Not Even With Their Audience.

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.

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

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

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 Been Changed A Little, As If By Having Meet A New Face, Crossed A Street We've Never Crossed Before.

He Knew Now, And The Knowledge Was Hard, That His Task Had Never Been To Undo What He Had Done, But To Finish What He Had Begun.

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

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

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?

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

By And Large Books Are Mankind's Best Invention.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Virginity Is Now A Mere Preamble Or Waiting Room To Be Got Out Of As Soon As Possible; It Is Without Significance.

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

Absolute Freedom Is Absolute Responsibility.

Absolute Freedom

Infinite Are The Arguments Of Mages.

Manipulated, One Manipulates Others.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A Man Who Doesn't Detest A Bad Government Is A Fool. And If There Were Such A Thing As A Good Government On Earth, It Would Be A Great Joy To Serve It.

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.

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

Paradise Is For Those Who Make Paradise.

Love Is The True Condition Of Human Life.

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.

Distrust Everything I Say. I Am Telling The Truth.

Telling The Truth

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.

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

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.

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

What Goes Too Long Unchanged Destroys Itself.

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

There Are Dance Artists, Painting Artists And Writing Artists. Authors Are Writing Artists. You Can Practice Art In Whatever Medium You Choose, And Words Are Mine.

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.

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

Children Know Perfectly Well That Unicorns Aren’t Real, But They Also Know That Books About Unicorns, If They Are Good Books, Are True Books.

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.

Fiction—and Poetry And Drama— Cleanse The Doors Of Perception.

Science Fiction Is Not Prescriptive; It Is Descriptive.

Science Fiction

There Are Two Kinds Of Knowledge, Local And Universal.

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

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.

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.

If Your Voice Is Heard By More People Because You've Earned Some Kind Of Name And Fame, Your Silence On An Issue Of Urgent Moral Importance Is Even More Of A Betrayal. Privilege Is Obligation.

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.

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

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.

Odonianism Is Anarchism. Not The Bomb-in-the-pocket Stuff, Which Is Terrorism, Whatever Name It Tries To Dignify Itself With, Not The Social-darwinist Economic 'libertarianism' Of The Far Right; But Anarchism, As Prefigured In Early Taoist Thought, And Expounded By Shelley And Kropotkin, Goldman And Goodman. Anarchism's Principal Target Is The Authoritarian State (capitalist Or Socialist); Its Principle Moral-practical Theme Is Cooperation (solidarity, Mutual Aid). It Is The Most Idealistic, And To Me The Most Interesting, Of All Political Theories.

Morning Comes Whether You Set The Alarm Or Not.

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

Progress Means Nothing To Presence.

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.

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

One Must Work With Time And Not Against It.

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!

I Believe That Maturity Is Not An Outgrowing, But A Growing Up: That An Adult Is Not A Dead Child, But A Child Who Survived. I Believe That All The Best Faculties Of A Mature Human Being Exist In The Child. . . That One Of The Most Deeply Human, And Humane, Of These Faculties Is The Power Of Imagination.

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.

Despair Speaks Evenly, In A Quiet Voice.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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