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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.

-Ursula K. Le Guin

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Time Has Two Aspects.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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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.

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There Is Neither Source Nor End, For All Things Are In The Center Of Time. As All The Stars May Be Reflected In A Round Raindrop Falling In The Night: So Too Do All The Stars Reflect The Raindrop. There Is Neither Darkness Nor Death, For All Things Are, In The Light Of The Moment, And Their End And Their Beginning Are One.

Claude Levi-strauss Has Been A Great Source Of Fruitful Irritation To My Mind.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Can True Function Arise From Basic Dysfunction?

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

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.

Science Fiction - And The Correct Shortcut Is 'sf' - Uses Actual Scientific Facts Or Theories For The Source Ideas Or Framework Of The Story. It Has Some Scientific Content, However Speculative. If It Breaks A Law Of Physics, It Knows It's Doing So And Follows Up The Consequences. If It Invents A Society Of Aliens, It Does So With Some Respect For And Knowledge Of The Social Sciences And What You Might Call Social Probabilities. And Some Of It Is Literarily Self-aware Enough To Treat Its Metaphors As Metaphors.

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

Desire For Power

The Island Of Gont, A Single Mountain That Lifts Its Peak A Mile Above The Storm-racked Northeast Sea, Is A Land Famous For Wizards.

Alone, No One Wins Freedom.

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!

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

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.

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.

What You Select From, In Order To Tell Your Story, Is Nothing Less Than Everything. What You Build Up Your World From, Your Local, Intelligible Rational, Coherent World, Is Nothing Less Than Everything. . . . . All Human Knowledge Is Local. Every Life, Each Human Life Is Local, Is Arbitrary, The Infinitesimal Momentary Glitter Of A Reflection.

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.

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 Read Books To Find Out Who We Are.

Self Understanding

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

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.

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

Much Arrogance Is Necessary Equipment For An Artist, I Think. Not Sufficient, But Necessary. It Carries One Across The Gaps.

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

Not Even Need And Love Can Defeat Fate.

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.

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

Well, We Think That Time "passes," Flows Past Us, But What If It Is We Who Move Forward, From Past To Future, Always Discovering The New? It Would Be A Little Like Reading A Book, You See. The Book Is All There, All At Once, Between Its Covers. But If You Want To Read The Story And Understand It, You Must Begin With The First Page, And Go Forward, Always In Order. So The Universe Would Be A Very Great Book, And We Would Be Very Small Readers.

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

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

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

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.

It Is Useless Work That Darkens The Heart.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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 They Come Prying They Can Leave Curious.

The More Defensive A Society, The More Conformist.

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.

Belief In Heaven And Hell Is A Big Deal In Judaism, Christianity, And Islam, And Some Forms Of Doctrinaire Buddhism. For The Rest Of Us It's Simply Meaningless. We Don't Live In Order To Die, We Live In Order To Live.

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.

Age And Illness Made One A Dualist

A Moral Choice In Its Basic Terms Appears To Be A Choice That Favors Survival: A Choice Made In Favor Of Life.

One Must Work With Time And Not Against It.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Nothing Said In Words Ever Came Out Quite Even. Things In Words Got Twisted And Ran Together, Instead Of Staying Straight And Fitting Together.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

There Is No Information About Corporations. There Is Only Disinformation.

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

Hardly Anybody Ever Writes Anything Nice About Introverts. Extroverts Rule. This Is Rather Odd When You Realise That About Nineteen Writers Out Of Twenty Are Introverts. We Are Been Taught To Be Ashamed Of Not Being 'outgoing'. But A Writer's Job Is Ingoing.

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.

You Cannot Blame Everything On The Enemy.

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.

Distrust Everything I Say. I Am Telling The Truth.

Telling The Truth

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

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.

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

Not Good Enough

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.

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

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.

We Decided That It Was No Good Asking What Is The Meaning Of Life, Because Life Isn't An Answer, Life Is The Question, And You, Yourself, Are The Answer.

Meaning Of Life

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

Manipulated, One Manipulates Others.

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.

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.

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.

True Understanding Is The Spur Of Genius

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

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

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.

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.

Manhood Is Patience. Mastery Is Nine Time Patience

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.

Progress Means Nothing To Presence.

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.

As You See, I Bear Some Resentment And Some Scars From The Years Of Anti-genre Bigotry. My Own Fiction, Which Moves Freely Around Among Realism, Magical Realism, Science Fiction, Fantasy Of Various Kinds, Historical Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Parable, And Other Subgenres, To The Point Where Much Of It Is Ungenrifiable, All Got Shoved Into The Sci Fi Wastebasket Or Labeled As Kiddilit - Subliterature.

Sure, It's Simple, Writing For Kids... Just As Simple As Bringing Them Up.

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

We're Each Of Us Alone, To Be Sure. What Can You Do But Hold Your Hand Out In The Dark?

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

The Hunger Of A Dragon Is Slow To Wake, But Hard To Sate.

The Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness.

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

It Is Yin And Yang. Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness ... How Did It Go? Light, Dark. Fear, Courage. Cold, Warmth. Female, Male. It Is Yourself ... Both And One. A Shadow On Snow.

Truth Is A Matter Of The Imagination.

Truth, As Ever, Avoids The Stranger.

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.

To Oppose Something Is To Maintain It.

Law Of Attraction

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.

Predictions Are Uttered By Prophets (free Of Charge); By Clairvoyants (who Usually Charge A Fee, And Are Therefore More Honored In Their Day Than Prophets); And By Futurologists (salaried). Prediction Is The Business Of Prophets, Clairvoyants, And Futurologists. It Is Not The Business Of Novelists. A Novelist's Business Is Lying.

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

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.

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.

Where There's Property, There's Theft.

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

Asking Yourself Questions

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

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.

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

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

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

Fire And Fear, Good Servants, Bad Lords.

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.

Almost Anything Carried To A Logical Extreme Becomes Depressing.

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.

Readers, After All, Are Making The World With You. You Give Them The Materials, But It's The Readers Who Build That World In Their Own Minds.

Dead Anarchists Make Martyrs, You Know, And Keep Living For Centuries. But Absent Ones Can Be Forgotten.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

A Forest Ecology Is A Delicate One. If The Forest Perishes, Its Fauna May Go With It. The Athshean Word For World Is Also The Word For Forest.

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

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

Do Remember, Though, That Unless You're A Playwright, The Result [dialogue] Isn't What You Want; It's Only An Element Of What You Want. Actors Embody And Re-create The Words Of Drama. In Fiction, A Tremendous Amount Of Story And Character May Be Given Through The Dialogue, But The Story-world And Its People Have To Be Created By The Storyteller. If There's Nothing In It But Disembodied Voices, Too Much Is Missing.

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

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 Explorer Who Will Not Come Back Or Send Back His Ships To Tell His Tale Is Not An Explorer, Only An Adventurer; And His Sons Are Born In Exile.

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.

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

My World, My Earth Is A Ruin. A Planet Spoiled By The Human Species. We Multiplied And Fought And Gobbled Until There Was Nothing Left, And Then We Died. We Controlled Neither Appetite Nor Violence; We Did Not Adapt. We Destroyed Ourselves. But We Destroyed The World First.

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

Sometimes I Not Only Stand There And Take It, I Even Smile At Them And Say I'm Sorry. When I Feel That Smile Coming Onto My Face, I Wish I Could Take My Face Off And Stamp On It.

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.

Any Human Power Can Be Resisted And Changed By Human Beings

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

Dangerous Things

Those Who Build Walls Are Their Own Prisoners.

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?

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

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.

Sometimes You Must Go Against The Wheel's Turn.

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.

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

Honestly, Orthodoxy Concerns Me About As Much As It Concerns Your Average Jackrabbit. I Only Follow Rules That Take Me Where I Want To Go. If There Aren't Any Rules, I Make Up My Own And Follow Them Strictly.

If You 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.

There Are No Right Answers To Wrong Questions.

Asking Questions

Questions And Answers

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

Prose Writers Are Interested Mostly In Life And Commas.

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

Who Knows A Man's Name, Holds That Man's Life In His Keeping. Thus To Ged, Who Had Lost Faith In Himself, Vetch Had Given Him That Gift That Only A Friend Can Give, The Proof Of Unshaken, Unshakeable Trust.

Paradise Is For Those Who Make Paradise.

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.

I'd Rather Get Bad News From An Honest Man Than Lies From A Flatterer.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Go To Bed; Tired Is Stupid.

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.

Truth Is A Matter Of The Imagination. The Soundest Fact May Fail Or Prevail In The Style Of Its Telling: Like That Singular Organic Jewel Of Our Seas, Which Grows Brighter As One Woman Wears It And, Worn By Another, Dulls And Goes To Dust.

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.

Revolution Is Our Obligation: Our Hope Of Evolution.

Belief In The Lie Is The Life Of The Lie.

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.

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

What's Wrong With Men?" Tenar Inquired Cautiously. As Cautiously, Lowering Her Voice, Moss Replied, "i Don't Know, My Dearie. I've Thought On It. Often I've Thought On It. The Best I Can Say It Is Like This. A Man's In His Skin, See, Like A Nut In Its Shell." She Held Up Her Long, Bent, Wet Fingers As If Holding A Walnut. "it's Hard And Strong, That Shell, And It's All Full Of Him. Full Of Grand Man-meat, Man-self. And That's All. That's All There Is. It's All Him And Nothing Else, Inside.

He Is Far Too Intelligent To Become Really Cerebral.

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

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.

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

Life Rises Out Of Death, Death Rises Out Of Life; In Being Opposite They Yearn To Each Other, They Give Birth To Each Other And Are Forever Reborn. And With Them, All Is Reborn, The Flower Of The Apple Tree, The Light Of The Stars. In Life Is Death. In Death Is Rebirth. What Then Is Life Without Death? Life Unchanging, Everlasting, Eternal?-what Is It But Death-death Without Rebirth?

...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.

Animals Do Neither Good Nor Evil. They Do As They Must Do.we May Call What They Do Harmful Or Useful, But Good And Evil Belong To Us, Who Chose To Choose What We Do. [. . .] The Animals Need Only Be And Do.we're Yoked, And They're Free. So To Be With An Animal Is To Know A Little Freedom.

What Goes Too Long Unchanged Destroys Itself.

Those Who Dislike Fantasy Are Very Often Equally Bored Or Repelled By Science. They Don't Like Either Hobbits, Or Quasars; They Don't Feel At Home With Them; They Don't Want Complexities, Remoteness. If There Is Any Such Connection, I'll Bet That It Is Basically An Aesthetic One

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

Power Over Others

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

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David Carradine

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