Amy ☁️ (tinycl0ud) > Amy ☁️ (tinycl0ud)'s Quotes

“A rock is a good thing, too, you know”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“I am sick of boys and noise and foolishness”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“And the truth is that 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...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“For a word to be spoken . . . there must be silence. Before, and after.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“Fantasy as an assembly-line commodity leaves me cold. But I rejoice when I see it written as what it always was—literature—and recognised as such.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“Most of this marvelous flood of literature was written for adults, but modernist literary ideology shunted it all to children. And kids could and did swim in it happily as in their native element, at least until some teacher or professor told them they had to come out, dry off, and breathe modernism ever after.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren't about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“But there are no wars in Earthsea. No soldiers, no armies, no battles. None of the militarism that came from the Arthurian saga and other sources and that by now, under the influence of fantasy war games, has become almost obligatory.
I didn't and don't think this way; my mind doesn't work in terms of war. My imagination refuses to limit all the elements that make an adventure story and make it exciting-danger, risk, challenge, courage to battlefields. A hero whose heroism consists of killing people is uninteresting to me, and I detest the hormonal war orgies of our visual media, the mechanical slaughter of endless battalions of black-clad, yellow-toothed, red-eyed demons.
War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to "a war against" whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“She had not realized how very different people were, how differently they saw life. She felt as if she had looked up and suddenly seen a whole new planet hanging huge and populous right outside the window, an entirely strange world, one in which the gods did not matter. She was scared by the solidity of Penthe's unfaith.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“But to her the temples were mere show, the Tombstones were rocks, the Tombs of Atuan were dark holes in the ground, terrible but empty.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“The Nameless Ones had hold of me already, bewildering my mind. And since then I have grown only weaker and stupider. One must not submit to them, one must resist, keep one's spirit always strong and certain.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“...when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan

“The reason people don't believe that I didn't plan a trilogy from the start is that fantasy now suffers from endemic trilogitis (or the even more serious form of the disease, incurable seriesism).”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“When I was writing the story in 1969, I knew of no women heroes of heroic fantasy since those in the works of Ariosto and Tasso in the Renaissance. These days there are plenty, though I wonder about some of them. The women warriors of current fantasy epics ruthless swordswomen with no domestic or sexual responsibility who gallop about slaughtering baddies— to me they look less like women than like boys in women's bodies in men's armor.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“Heroic fantasy descends to us from an archaic world . . . In such a world, I could put a girl at the heart of my story, but I couldn't give her a man's freedom, or chances equal to a man's chances. She couldn't be a hero in the hero-tale sense. Not even in a fantasy? No. Because to me, fantasy isn't wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality. After all, even in a democracy, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, after forty years of feminist striving, the reality is that we live in a top-down power structure that was shaped by, and is still dominated by, men.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“Certainly Arha/Tenar would better satisfy feminist idealists if she did everything all by herself. But the truth as I saw it, and as I established it in the novel, was that she couldn't. My imagination wouldn't provide a scenario where she could, because my heart told me incontrovertibly that neither gender could go far without the other. So, in my story, neither the woman nor the man can get free without the other. Not in that trap. Each has to ask for the other's help and learn to trust and depend on the other.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“To deny the past is to deny the future. A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it. If the rowan's roots are shallow, it bears no crown.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore

“But when we crave power over life-endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“Only one thing in the world can resist an evil-hearted man. And that is another man. In our shame is our glory. Only our spirit, which is capable of evil, is capable of overcoming it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“They complain about bad times, but they don't know when the bad times began; they say the work's shoddy, but they don't improve it; they don't even know the difference between an artisan and a spell-worker, between handicraft and the Art Magic. It's as if they had no lines and distinctions and colors clear in their heads. Everything's the same to them; everything's grey . . . This is evil, evil, what passes on this island: this loss of craft and pride, this joylessness, this waste. This is the work of an evil will.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“It is much easier for men to act than to refrain from acting. We will continue to do good and to do evil.... But if there were a king over us all again and he sought counsel of a mage, as in the days of old, and I were that mage, I would say to him: My lord, 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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“I was afraid of death. I was so afraid of it I would not look at you, because you might be dying. I could think of nothing, except that there was—there was a way of not dying for me, if I could find it. But all the time life was running out, as if there was a great wound and the blood running from it—such as you had. But this was in everything. And I did nothing, nothing, but try to hide from the horror of dying.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor anything. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose.... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the light of sunrise and sunset, to buy safety for yourself—safety forever?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“What harm have the trees done them?" he said. "Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“To see a candle's light, one must take it into a dark place.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

“But I, who am old, who have done what I must do, who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know that there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin