The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

they gave him the key to the house of manhood, the prison where they lived and he would live. But they had known other houses.

fourteen is such a fearful age, when you find out so fast what you’re capable of being, but also what a toll the world expects. . . .

One day is the day for moving on, and overnight, the next day, there is no more good in moving on, because you have come where you were going to.

They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.

It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There’s the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.

I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth, from orbit.