Background Image

...

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.

-Ursula K. Le Guin

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Living In A World

Ursula K. Le Guin

...

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.

Views: 7801

Topic

More From Ursula K. Le Guin

...if At Moments The Facts Seem To Alter With An Altered Voice, Why Then You Can Choose The Fact You Like Best; Yet None Of Them Are False, And It Is All One Story.

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.

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.

Success Is Somebody Else's Failure.

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

Great Self-destruction Follows Upon Unfounded Fear.

Self Destruction

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Alone, No One Wins Freedom.

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.

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.

Absolute Freedom Is Absolute Responsibility.

Absolute Freedom

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

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.

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.

Lying Is The Misuse Of Language. We Know That. We Need To Remember That It Works The Other Way Round Too. Even With The Best Intentions, Language Misused, Language Used Stupidly, Carelessly, Brutally, Language Used Wrongly, Breeds Lies, Half-truths, Confusion. In That Sense You Can Say That Grammar Is Morality. And It Is In That Sense That I Say A Writer's First Duty Is To Use Language Well.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 .

There's No Way To Use Power For Good.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

People Who Deny The Existence Of Dragons Are Often Eaten By Dragons. From Within.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Secondhand Experience Breaks Down A Block From The Car Lot.

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

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

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

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.

Infinite Are The Arguments Of Mages.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

The Artist Deals With What Cannot Be Said In Words.

Ignorant Power Is A Bane!

Almost Everything Is Double Like That For Adolescents; Their Lies Are True And Their Truths Are Lies, And Their Hearts Are Broken By The World. They Gyre And Fall; They See Through Everything, And Are Blind.

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

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

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 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.

See, The Thing Is, 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.

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

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

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

It Is Useless Work That Darkens The Heart.

The More Defensive A Society, The More Conformist.

Grieving, Like Being Blind, Is A Strange Business; You Have To Learn How To Do It. We Seek Company In Mourning, But After The Early Bursts Of Tears, After The Praises Have Been Spoken, And The Good Days Remembered, And The Lament Cried, And The Grave Closed, There Is No Company In Grief. It Is A Burden Borne Alone.

We Of Es Toch Tell A Little Myth, Which Says That In The Beginning The Creator Told A Great Lie. For There Was Nothing At All, But The Creator Spoke, Saying, It Exists. And Behold, In Order That The Lie Of God Might Be God's Truth, The Universe At Once Began To Exist.

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.

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

The Sunlights Differ, But There Is Only One Darkness.

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

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

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

A Wrong That Cannot Be Repaired Must Be Transcended.

Saying That, He Was Suddenly Himself Again, Despite His Lunatic Hair And Eyes: A Man Whose Personal Dignity Went So Deep As To Be Nearly Invisible... It Was More Than Diginity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like A Block Of Wood Not Carved. The Infinite Possibility, The Unlimited And Unqualified Wholeness Of Being Of The Uncommitted, The Nonacting, The Uncarved: The Being Who, Being Nothing But Himself, Is Everything.

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

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

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

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

Writers Have To Get Used To Launching Something Beautiful And Watching It Crash And Burn. They Also Have To Learn When To Let Go Control, When The Work Takes Off On Its Own And Flies, Farther Than They Ever Planned Or Imagined, To Places They Didn't Know They Knew.

I Use A Whole Lot Of Half-assed Semicolons; There Was One Of Them Just Now; That Was A Semicolon After 'semicolons,' And Another One After 'now.

First Sentences Are Doors To Worlds.

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.

Any Human Power Can Be Resisted And Changed By Human Beings

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To Know There Is A Choice Is To Have To Make The Choice: Change Or Stay: River Or Rock.

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.

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

It Is Not Human To Be Without Shame And Without Desire.

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

We Read Books To Find Out Who We Are. What Other People, Real Or Imaginary, Do And Think And Feel... Is An Essential Guide To Our Understanding Of What We Ourselves Are And May Become.

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.

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

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

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

I'm Not A Quester Or A Searcher For The Truth. I Don't Really Think There Is One Answer, So I Never Went Looking For It. My Impulse Is Less Questing And More Playful. I Like Trying On Ideas And Ways Of Life And Religious Approaches. I'm Just Not A Good Candidate For Conversion.

True Understanding Is The Spur Of Genius

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.

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

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.

Morning Comes Whether You Set The Alarm Or Not.

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

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

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

I Can Never Get Used To The Fact, Though I Know It, That Women Are Born Cynics. Men Have To Learn Cynicism. Infant Girls Could Teach It To Them.

I Think There Is No Way To Write About Being Alone. To Write Is To Tell Something To Somebody To Communicate To Others. . . . Solitude Is Noncommunication, The Absence Of Others, The Presence Of A Self Sufficient To Itself.

It's Not A Weapon Or A Woman Can Make A Man, Or Magery Either, Or Any Power, Anything But Himself.

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

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

It Is No Secret. All Power Is One In Source And End, I Think. Years And Distances, Stars And Candles, Water And Wind And Wizardry, The Craft In A Man's Hand And The Wisdom In A Tree's Root: They All Arise Together. My Name, And Yours, And The True Name Of The Sun, Or A Spring Of Water, Or An Unborn Child, All Are Syllables Of The Great Word That Is Very Slowly Spoken By The Shining Of The Stars. There Is No Other Power. No Other Name.

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

By Such Literalism, Fundamentalism, Religions Betrayed The Best Intentions Of Their Founders. Reducing Thought To Formula, Replacing Choice By Obedience, These Preachers Turned The Living Word Into Dead Law.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

Reading Is Performance. The Reader--the Child Under The Blanket With A Flashlight, The Woman At The Kitchen Table, The Man At The Library Desk--performs The Work. The Performance Is Silent. The Readers Hear The Sounds Of The Words And The Beat Of The Sentences Only In Their Inner Ear. Silent Drummers On Noiseless Drums. An Amazing Performance In An Amazing Theater.

Statesmen Remember Things Selectively.

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.

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?

Owning Is Owing, Having Is Hoarding.

What Is An Anarchist? One Who, Choosing, Accepts The Responsibility Of Choice.

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

If A Book Were Written All In Numbers, It Would Be True. It Would Be Just. Nothing Said In Words Ever Came Out Quite Even. Things In Words Got Twisted And Ran Together, Instead Of Staying Straight And Fitting Together. But Underneath The Words, At The Center, Like The Center Of The Square, It All Came Out Even. Everything Could Change, Yet Nothing Would Be Lost. If You Saw The Numbers You Could See That, The Balance, The Pattern. You Saw The Foundations Of The World. And They Were Solid.

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.

And I Needed A Rock. Something To Hold Onto, To Stand On. Something Solid. Because Everything Was Going Soft, Turning Into Mush, Into Marsh, Into Fog. Fog Closing In On All Sides. I Didn't Know Where I Was At All.

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

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.

You Are All In Jail. Each Alone, Solitary, With A Heap Of What He Owns. You Live In Prison, Die In Prison. It Is All I Can See In Your Eyes - The Wall, The Wall!

Hope Is A Slow Business.

Age And Illness Made One A Dualist

The Creative Adult Is The Child Who Has Survived.

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

Science Fiction Is Not Prescriptive; It Is Descriptive.

Science Fiction

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Can True Function Arise From Basic Dysfunction?

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

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

Even A Poet Cannot Get Everything Right.

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.

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.

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

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 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

Literacy Is So You Can Read The Operating Instructions.

Love Does Not Obey The Mind, And Turns To Hate When Forced.

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.

We Broke The World To Make It Whole.

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.

Fire And Fear, Good Servants, Bad Lords.

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.

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.

They Can Send Death At Once, But Life Is Slower.

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. What Is The Other Text, The Original? I Have No Answer. I Suppose It Is The Source, The Deep Sea Where Ideas Swim, And One Catches Them In Nets Of Words And Swings Them Shining Into The Boat... Where In This Metaphor They Die And Get Canned And Eaten In Sandwiches.

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

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

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

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.

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

When I Was Young, I Had To Choose Between The Life Of Being And The Life Of Doing. And I Leapt At The Latter Like A Trout To A Fly. But Each Deed You Do, Each Act, Binds You To Itself And To Its Consequences, And Makes You Act Again And Yet Again. Then Very Seldom Do You Come Upon A Space, A Time Like This, Between Act And Act, When You May Stop And Simply Be. Or Wonder Who, After All, You Are.

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.

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.

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.

Not Even Need And Love Can Defeat Fate.

Every Book Purchase Made From Amazon Is A Vote For A Culture Without Content And Without Contentment.

By And Large Books Are Mankind's Best Invention.

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

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

To Oppose Something Is To Maintain It.

Law Of Attraction

In The Tale, In The Telling, We Are All One Blood. Take The Tale In Your Teeth, Then, And Bite Till The Blood Runs, Hoping It's Not Poison; And We Will All Come To The End Together, And Even To The Beginning: Living, As We Do, In The Middle.

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 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.

Trending Author

Paul Zane Pilzer

Category