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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?

-Ursula K. Le Guin

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It Is Only When

Ursula K. Le Guin

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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?

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

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

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

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.

To Hear, One Must Be Silent.

Where There's Property, There's Theft.

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.

One Must Work With Time And Not Against It.

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.

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.

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

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

...fiction Is Made Out Of The Writer's Experience, His Whole Life From Infancy On, Everything He's Thought And Done And Seen And Read And Dreamed. But Experience Isn't Something You Go And Get - It's A Gift, And The Only Prerequisite For Receiving It Is That You Be Open To It. A Closed Soul Can Have The Most Immense Adventures, Go Through A Civil War Or A Trip To The Moon, And Have Nothing To Show For All That "experience"; Whereas The Open Soul Can Do Wonders With Nothing.

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

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.

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

Our Roots Are In The Dark; The Earth Is Our Country. Why Did We Look Up For Blessing -- Instead Of Around, And Down? What Hope We Have Lies There. Not In The Sky Full Of Orbiting Spy-eyes And Weaponry, But In The Earth We Have Looked Down Upon. Not From Above, But From Below. Not In The Light That Blinds, But In The Dark That Nourishes, Where Human Beings Grow Human Souls.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

By And Large Books Are Mankind's Best Invention.

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

Age And Illness Made One A Dualist

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

Alone, No One Wins Freedom.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I Doubt That The Imagination Can Be Suppressed. If You Truly Eradicated It In A Child, He Would Grow Up To Be An Eggplant.

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 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.

Paradise Is For Those Who Make Paradise.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Desire For Power

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.

Infinite Are The Arguments Of Mages.

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.

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

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

As You Read A Book Word By Word And Page By Page, You Participate In Its Creation, Just As A Cellist Playing A Bach Suite Participates, Note By Note, In The Creation, The Coming-to-be, The Existence, Of The Music. And, As You Read And Re-read, The Book Of Course Participates In The Creation Of You, Your Thoughts And Feelings, The Size And Temper Of Your Soul.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

Not Good Enough

Very Seldom Do You Come Upon A Space, A Time Like This, Between Act And Act, When You May Stop And Simply Be.

Can True Function Arise From Basic Dysfunction?

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

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.

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.

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

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

A 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.

We Broke The World To Make It Whole.

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

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.

In Reading A Novel, Any Novel, We Have To Know Perfectly Well That The Whole Thing Is Nonsense, And Then, While Reading, Believe Every Word Of It. Finally, When We're Done With It, We May Find - If It's A Good Novel - That We're A Bit Different From What We Were Before We Read It, That We Have Changed A Little... But It's Very Hard To Say Just What We Learned, How We Were Changed.

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.

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.

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.

Go To Bed; Tired Is Stupid.

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.

Even A Poet Cannot Get Everything Right.

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.

But You Must Not Change One Thing, One Pebble, One Grain Of Sand, Until You Know What Good And Evil Will Follow On That Act. The World Is In Balance, In Equilibrium. A Wizard's Power Of Changing And Summoning Can Shake The Balance Of The World. It Is Dangerous, That Power...it Must Follow Knowledge, And Serve Need.

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

The More Defensive A Society, The More Conformist.

As A Kitten Does What All Other Kittens Do, So A Child Wants To Do What Other Children Do, With A Wanting That Is As Powerful As It Is Mindless. Since We Human Beings Have To Learn What We Do, We Have To Start Out That Way, But Human Mindfulness Begins Where That Wish To Be The Same Leaves Off.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Not Even Need And Love Can Defeat Fate.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

What Is More Arrogant Than Honesty?

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.

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.

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

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

First Sentences Are Doors To Worlds.

If Civilization Has An Opposite, It Is War.

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

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

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.

Science Fiction Properly Conceived, Like All Serious Fiction, However Funny, Is A Way Of Trying To Describe What Is In Fact Going On, What People Actually Do And Feel, How People Relate To Everything Else In This Vast Sack, This Belly Of The Universe, This Womb Of Things To Be And Tomb Of Things That Were, This Unending Story.

It Is A Terrible Thing, This Kindess That Human Beings Do Not Lose. Terrible, Because When We Are Finally Naked In The Dark And Cold, It Is All We Have. We Who Are So Rich, So Full Of Strength, We End Up With That Small Change. We Have Nothing Else To Give.

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.

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.

The Law Of Evolution Is That The Strongest Survives.

What She Needs, At Least One Thing She Needs, Is Companionship. After All Why Should She Eat? Who Needs Her To Be Alive? What We Call Psychosis Is Sometimes Simply Realism. But Human Beings Can't Live On Realism Alone.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

It Win Be A Device That Will Permit Communication Without Any Time Interval Between Two Points In Space. The Device Will Not Transmit Messages, Of Course; Simultaneity Is Identity. But To Our Perceptions, That Simultaneity Will Function As A Transmission, A Sending. So We Will Be Able To Use It To Talk Between Worlds, Without The Long Waiting For The Message To Go And The Reply To Return That Electromagnetic Impulses Require. It Is Really A Very Simple Matter. Like A Kind Of Telephone.

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.

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.

There Is Not Much You Can Say About A Baby Unless You Are Talking With Its Father Or Another Mother Or Nurse; Infants Are Not Part Of The Realm Of Ordinary Language, Talk Is Inadequate To Them As They Are Inadequate To Talk.

What Goes Too Long Unchanged Destroys Itself.

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.

The Word Must Be Heard In Silence; There Must Be Darkness To See The Stars.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 See A Candle's Light, One Must Take It Into A Dark Place. This Is The Same As To See The Good And Be Grateful, One Must Compare And Contrast It With Something Worse - Not Better!

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

There Are Two Kinds Of Knowledge, Local And Universal.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Asking Yourself Questions

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.

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.

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.

Distrust Everything I Say. I Am Telling The Truth.

Telling The Truth

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Ignorant Power Is A Bane!

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.

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

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

Science Fiction Is Not Prescriptive; It Is Descriptive.

Science Fiction

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

The Reason Literacy Is Important Is That Literature Is The Operating Instructions. The Best Manual We Have. The Most Useful Guide To The Country We're Visiting, Life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Creative Adult Is The Child Who Has Survived.

The King Was Pregnant.

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

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.

We Live In Capitalism, Its Power Seems Inescapable - But Then, So Did The Divine Right Of Kings. Any Human Power Can Be Resisted And Changed By Human Beings. Resistance And Change Often Begin In Art. Very Often In Our Art, The Art Of Words.

As A Writer, You Are Free.

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

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