Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula Kroeber Le Guinis an American author of novels, children's books, and short stories, mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She has also written poetry and essays. First published in the 1960s, her work has often depicted futuristic or imaginary alternative worlds in politics, the natural environment, gender, religion, sexuality and ethnography...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth21 October 1929
CountryUnited States of America
religious peace true-identity
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.
travel son ships
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.
wise fool vain
The wise needn't ask, the fool asks in vain.
writing technology fiction
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
hate mean expression
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.
mean progress
Progress means nothing to presence.
needs enough
But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
rocks fog sides
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.
time moving book
Well, we think that time "passes," flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.
time
One must work with time and not against it.
running time circles
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.
time moving foolish
O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.
writing heart my-heart
I write with all my heart
song believe character
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.