Daniela > Daniela's Quotes

“But he had not brought anything. His hands were empty, as they had always been.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand
outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“For there is nothing important except people. A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“It appears that we've given up on the long-range view. That we've decided not to think about consequences—about cause and effect. Maybe that's why I feel that I live in exile. I used to live in a country that had a future.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Opinion all too often leaves no room for anything but itself.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Meaning - this is perhaps the common note, the bane I am seeking. What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story ... ? Tell me what it Means.

But that is not my job, honey. That's your job.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can't life and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model. . . .”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“I have had a lot to put up with," she said, looking meaningfully at me. "I know the Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a day.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?