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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.

-Ursula K. Le Guin

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The Pornography Of Violence

Ursula K. Le Guin

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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.

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

Owning Is Owing, Having Is Hoarding.

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

Love Is The True Condition Of Human Life.

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

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.

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

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.

Fantasy Is Probably The Oldest Literary Device For Talking About Reality.

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

When The Genuine Myth Rises Into Consciousness, That Is Always Its Message. You Must Change Your Life.

Changing Your Life

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

Belief In The Lie Is The Life Of The Lie.

What You Love, You Will Love. What You Undertake You Will Complete. You Are A Fulfiller Of Hope; You Are To Be Relied On. But Seventeen Years Give Little Armor Against Despair...consider, Arren. To Refuse Death Is To Refuse Life.

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.

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.

Skill In Writing Frees You To Write What You Want To Write. It May Also Show You What You Want To Write. Craft Enables Art.

At The Pit's Bottom Is No Anger.

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

My Soul Is Ten Thousand Miles Wide And Extremely Invisibly Deep. It Is The Same Size As The Sea, And You Cannot, You Cannot Cram It Into Beer Cans And Fingernails And Stake It Out In Lots And Own It. It Will Drown You All And Never Even Notice.

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.

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

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

Art Is Action. The Way I Live My Life To Its Highest Degree Is By Writing, The Practice Of Art.

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

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.

Manipulated, One Manipulates Others.

All Makers Must Leave Room For Acts Of The Spirit.

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.

Infinite Are The Arguments Of Mages.

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

If You See A Whole Thing - It Seems That It's Always Beautiful. Planets, Lives... But Up Close A World's All Dirt And Rocks. And Day To Day, Life's A Hard Job, You Get Tired, You Lose The Pattern.

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.

I Certainly Wasn't Happy. Happiness Has To Do With Reason, And Only Reason Earns It. What I Was Given Was The Thing You Can't Earn, And Can't Keep, And Often Don't Even Recognize At The Time; I Mean Joy.

The Earth Is Beautiful, And Bright, And Kindly, But That Is Not All. The Earth Is Also Terrible, And Dark, And Cruel.

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

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

Even A Poet Cannot Get Everything Right.

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Go To Bed; Tired Is Stupid.

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It Is Useless Work That Darkens The Heart.

Secondhand Experience Breaks Down A Block From The Car Lot.

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

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There Is No Kingdom Like The Forests.

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O Foolish Writer. Now Moves. Even In Storytime, Dreamtime, Once-upon-a-time, Now Isn't Then.

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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.

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.

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

To Have A Choice At All Is To Be Privileged.

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.

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

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.

Paradise Is For Those Who Make Paradise.

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.

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.

The Danger In Trying To Do Good Is That The Mind Comes To Confuse The Intent Of Goodness With The Act Of Doing Things Well.

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

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

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!

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

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

Sleeping People Are So Remote.... Right Here, But Out Of Communication. That's What Strikes Humans As Uncanny About Sleep. Its Utter Privacy. The Sleeper Turns His Back On Everyone.

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

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

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.

He Is Far Too Intelligent To Become Really Cerebral.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Truth, As Ever, Avoids The Stranger.

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.

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

The Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness.

The Important Thing Is Not The Finding, It Is The Seeking, It Is The Devotion With Which One Spins The Wheel Of Prayer And Scripture, Discovering The Truth Little By Little.

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

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

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

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

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.

Can True Function Arise From Basic Dysfunction?

To Hear, One Must Be Silent.

Ignorant Power Is A Bane!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

There Was One Person Who Greatly And Directly Benefited My Career--my Agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 To The Late Nineties She Represented All My Work, In Every Field Except Poetry. I Could Send Her An Utterly Indescribable Story, And She'd Sell It To Playboy Or The Harvard Law Review Or Weird Tales Or The New Yorker--she Knew Where To Take It. She Never Told Me What To Write Or Not Write, She Never Told Me, That Won't Sell, And She Never Meddled With My Prose.

Nothing Remains The Same From One Moment To The Next, You Can't Step Into The Same River Twice. Life--evolution--the Whole Universe Of Space/time, Matter/energy--existence Itself--is Essentially Change.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Belief Is The Wound That Knowledge Heals.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Desire For Power

Age And Illness Made One A Dualist

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.

Literacy Is So You Can Read The Operating Instructions.

For Fantasy Is True, Of Course. It Isn't Factual, But It Is True. Children Know That. Adults Know It Too, And That Is Precisely Why Many Of Them Are Afraid Of Fantasy. They Know That Its Truth Challenges, Even Threatens, All That Is False, All That Is Phony, Unnecessary, And Trivial In The Life They Have Let Themselves Be Forced Into Living. They Are Afraid Of Dragons, Because They Are Afraid Of Freedom.

Fire And Fear, Good Servants, Bad Lords.

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.

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

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

Distrust Everything I Say. I Am Telling The Truth.

Telling The Truth

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.

We Scarcely Know How Much Of Our Pleasure And Interest In Life Comes To Us Through Our Eyes Until We Have To Do Without Them; And Part Of That Pleasure Is That The Eyes Can Choose Where To Look. But The Ears Can't Choose Where To Listen.

After A Long Time Spent Learning How To Write As A Woman Instead Of As An Honorary Man, I Was Able To Come Back To Earthsea And Write The Next Three Books In Another And Newer Tradition: That Of Questioning, Rather Than Accepting, The Gendering Of Power As Male.

It Did Not Matter, After All. He Was Only One Man. One Man's Fate Is Not Important. "if It Is Not, What Is?" He Could Not Endure Those Remembered Words.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

Jungians Such As Joseph Campbell Have Generalised Such Journeys Into A Set Of Archetypal Events And Images. Though They Can Be Useful In Criticism, I Mistrust Them As Fatally Reductive. “ah, The Night Sea Voyage!” We Cry, Feeling That We Have Understood Something Important — But We’ve Merely Recognised It. Until We Are Actually On That Voyage, We Have Understood Nothing.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

...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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

As A Man's Real Power Grows And His Knowledge Widens, Ever The Way He Can Follow Grows Narrower: Until At Last He Chooses Nothing,but Does Only And Wholly What He Must Do.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

A Wrong That Cannot Be Repaired Must Be Transcended.

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.

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.

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

Any Human Power Can Be Resisted And Changed By Human Beings

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.

I Don’t Think ‘science Fiction’ Is A Very Good Name For It, But It’s The Name That We’ve Got. It Is Different From Other Kinds Of Writing, I Suppose, So It Deserves A Name Of Its Own. But Where I Can Get Prickly And Combative Is, If I’m Just Called A Sci-fi Writer. I’m Not. I’m A Novelist And Poet. Don’t Shove Me Into Your Damn Pigeonhole, Where I Don’t Fit, Because I’m All Over. My Tentacles Are Coming Out Of The Pigeonhole In All Directions.

When He Found That The Administrators Were Upset, He Laughed. “do They Expect Students Not To Be Anarchists?” He Said. “what Else Can The Young Be? When You Are On The Bottom, You Must Organize From The Bottom Up

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.

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.

I Have Told The Story I Was Asked To Tell. I Have Closed It, As So Many Stories Close, With A Joining Of Two People. What Is One Man's And One Woman's Love And Desire, Against The History Of Two Worlds, The Great Revolutions Of Our Lifetimes, The Hope, The Unending Cruelty Of Our Species? A Little Thing. But A Key Is A Little Thing, Next To The Door It Opens. If You Lose The Key, The Door May Never Be Unlocked. It Is In Our Bodies That We Lose Or Begin Our Freedom, In Our Bodies That We Accept Or End Our Slavery. So I Wrote This Book For My Friend, With Whom I Have Lived And Will Die Free.

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

The More Defensive A Society, The More Conformist.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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