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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Consistency is a virtue until it gets annoying.

You can’t get blood from a stone, they say, nor can you give it to a stone; it takes no stain.

They’re absolutely certain and completely ignorant. Like spring—like the lambs in spring. They have never done anything and they know exactly what to do.”

Only persons in authority can have secrets. Their secrets are all good, even when they are lies.

Whose thoughts are you thinking?

I will not act Eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees for death. If that is what they want to see, let them look into one another’s eyes and see it there.

It’s still your story, Aunt May; it was your lion. He came to you. He brought his death to you, a gift; but the men with the guns won’t take gifts, they think they own death already. And so they took from you the honor he did you, and you felt that loss. I wanted to restore it.

“After all,” she added, “maybe all this place, the other places too, maybe they’re all only one side of the weaving. I don’t know. I can only look with one eye at a time, how can I tell how deep it goes?”

“You’re so lucky!” She did. “Yeah,” Gret said. “Some Greek, I think it was some Greek said don’t say that to anybody until they’re dead.”

But in wars they kill people more or less simultaneously, not one by one, so that they are mass murderers, not serial killers, but I’m not sure I see the difference, really. Since for the person being murdered it only happens once.

I would have made my soul and know what it was for. But I have made my soul and I don’t know what to do with it. Who wants it?

It’s not my job as a writer to make life easy for anybody. Including myself.

the World As We Know It is filled almost solid with extraverts, who refuse to learn how to spell “extravert” because they’re too busy rushing around in crowds shouting and cellphoning and texting and friending and joining groups and being outgoing and sociable to pay any attention to stuff like Latin prefixes, or silence, or introverts.

I am strictly an amateur. I don’t know anything about reality, but I know what I like.

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.

This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.

“So we’re sort of ritual humans,” said Betton. “Volunteers,” Tai said. “Experimenters,” said Lidi. “Experiencers,” said Shan. “Explorers,” Oreth said. “Gamblers,” said Karth.

Why do you make beauty to kill us, my Lord?

Roo-roo-roo, Gubu went under her ear, listen to me, I’m here, life goes on, where’s dinner?

“The untold story mothers the lie,”

learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence.

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

“Do you ever dream of flying?” Lawyerlike, he was slow to answer. He looked away, out the window. “Doesn’t everyone?” he said.

On the seventeenth of August, 1909, in Punta Arenas, Chile, all the members of the Expedition met for the first time:

But housekeeping, the art of the infinite, is no game for amateurs.

THE BACKSIDE OF heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that.

Zoe lost all patience at last and said, “By God, Teresa, if you say ‘José!’ once more I hope you have a penguin!”