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

-Ursula K. Le Guin

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I Think," Tehanu Said

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

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More From Ursula K. Le Guin

The Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness.

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

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.

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

Power Over Others

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.

Age And Illness Made One A Dualist

We Like To Think We Live In Daylight, But Half The World Is Always Dark, And Fantasy, Like Poetry, Speaks The Language Of The Night.

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

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

There's A Point, Around The Age Of 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.

Rest Of Your Life

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.

One Must Work With Time And Not Against It.

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

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

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

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.

Dreams Take Short Cuts.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

Not Even Need And Love Can Defeat Fate.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Part Of The Particular Interest And Beauty Of Science Fiction And Fantasy: Writer And Reader Collaborate In World-making.

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

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

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

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

Dangerous Things

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

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.

All Or Nothing At All, The True Lover Says, And That's The Truth Of It. My Love Will Never Die, He Says. He Claims Eternity. And Rightly. How Can It Die When It's Life Itself? What Do We Know Of Eternity But The Glimpse We Get Of It When We Enter In That Bond?

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

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.

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.

To Be Oneself Is A Rare Thing, And A Great One.

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

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

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

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

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.

If You Want To Know All About The Sea ... And Ask The Sea Itself, What Does It Say? Grumble Grumble Swish Swish. It Is Too Busy Being Itself To Know Anything About Itself.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Belief Is The Wound That Knowledge Heals.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Not Good Enough

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Despair Speaks Evenly, In A Quiet Voice.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

The More Defensive A Society, The More Conformist.

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.

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.

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

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.

Paradise Is For Those Who Make Paradise.

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.

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

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.

The Artist Deals With What Cannot Be Said In Words.

I Know That Nobody Who Hasn't Been In Battle Or Under Attack Can Know What War Is. But Even In Terms Of Being Safe At Home, It's Also True That Many Americans Who Think They Know What Being At War Is, Don't. Including, Of Course, George W. Bush And His People. They Don't Have A Clue.

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

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.

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.

Absolute Freedom Is Absolute Responsibility.

Absolute Freedom

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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

I Believe That All Novels, ... Deal With Character, And That It Is To Express Character – Not To Preach Doctrines, Sing Songs, Or Celebrate The Glories Of The British Empire, That The Form Of The Novel, So Clumsy, Verbose, And Undramatic, So Rich, Elastic, And Alive, Has Been Evolved ... The Great Novelists Have Brought Us To See Whatever They Wish Us To See Through Some Character. Otherwise They Would Not Be Novelists, But Poet, Historians, Or Pamphleteers.

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.

All Of Us Have To Learn How To Invent Our Lives , Make Them Up, Imagine Them. We Need To Be Taught These Skills; We Need Guides To Show Us How. If We Don't, Our Lives Get Made Up For Us By Other People .

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

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

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

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.

Prose Writers Are Interested Mostly In Life And Commas.

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.

The Sunlights Differ, But There Is Only One Darkness.

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

It's The Self That Suffers, And There's A Place Where The Self--ceases. I Don't Know How To Say It. But I Believe That The Reality--the Truth That I Recognize In Suffering As I Don't In Comfort And Happiness--that The Reality Of Pain Is Not Pain. If You Can Get Through It. If You Can Endure It All The Way.

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

Those Who Build Walls Are Their Own Prisoners.

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

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

As A Writer, You Are Free.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

A Man Would Know The End He Goes To, But He Cannot Know It If He Does Not Turn, And Return To His Beginning, And Hold That Beginning In His Being. If He Would Not Be A Stick Whirled And Whelmed In The Stream, He Must Be The Stream Itself, All Of It, From Its Spring To Its Sinking In The Sea.

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

Sci-fi Uses The Images That Sf - Starting With H.g. Wells - Made Familiar: Space Travel, Aliens, Galactic Wars And Federations, Time Machines, Et Cetera, Taking Them Literally, Not Caring If They Are Possible Or Even Plausible. It Has No Interest In Or Relation To Real Science Or Technology. It's Fantasy In Space Suits. Spectacle. Wizards With Lasers. Kids With Ray Guns. I've Written Both, But I Have To Say I Respect Science Fiction Enough That I Wince When People Call It Sci-fi.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

What Else Can The Young Be? When You Are On The Bottom, You Must Organize From The Bottom Up

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.

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

Life Goes On, Even If Two-headed And Glowing Faintly In The Dark.

By And Large Books Are Mankind's Best Invention.

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.

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

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!

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

Prose And Poetry

We Need Writers Who Know The Difference Between The Production Of A Commodity And The Practice Of An Art.

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

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.

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.

Greed Puts Out The Sun.

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

She Had Always Known That All Lives Are In Common, Rejoicing In Her Kinship To The Fish In The Tanks Of Her Laboratories, Seeking The Experience Of Existences Outside The Human Boundary.

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

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.

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

There Are Times When You Have To Speak Because Silence Is Betrayal.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Belief In The Lie Is The Life Of The Lie.

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.

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

If Civilization Has An Opposite, It Is War.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Go To Bed; Tired Is Stupid.

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

You Cannot Buy The Revolution. You Cannot Make The Revolution. You Can Only Be The Revolution. It Is In Your Spirit, Or It Is Nowhere.

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

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