Always Coming Home Quotes

“When I take you to the Valley, you’ll see the blue hills on the left and the blue hills on the right, the rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow late in the rainy season, and maybe you’ll say, “There it is, that’s it!” But I’ll say. “A little farther.” We’ll go on, I hope, and you’ll see the roofs of the little towns and the hillsides yellow with wild oats, a buzzard soaring and a woman singing by the shadows of a creek in the dry season, and maybe you’ll say, “Let’s stop here, this is it!” But I’ll say, “A little farther yet.” We’ll go on, and you’ll hear the quail calling on the mountain by the springs of the river, and looking back you’ll see the river running downward through the wild hills behind, below, and you’ll say, “Isn’t that the Valley?” And all I will be able to say is “Drink this water of the spring, rest here awhile, we have a long way yet to go and I can’t go without you.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast.... The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“Owning is owing, having is hoarding.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“...There's no right answer
to the wrong question.
Now what do we do?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“Our souls are old,
often used before.
The knife outlasts
the hand that holds it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“Judgement is poverty.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we have is here, now.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“Bucket

I feel so dreamy
dreamy lazy, crazy sleepy
like I want to be there
in the doorway, the doorway
or the porch corner
be sitting, be empty
notdoing not going
an old bucket left there
in the porch corner is like I am
an old empty bucket somebody left there.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“In a State, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful—another piston in the great machine?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents to drink and be clean and irrigate with, using water mindfully, carefully. They lived in a land that answers greed with drought and death. A difficult land: aloof yet sensitive.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“Need every word be translated? Sometimes the untranslated word might serve to remind us that language is not meaning, that intelligibility is an element of it only, a function. The untranslated word or name is not functional. It sits there. Written, it is a row of letters, which spoken with a more or less wild guess at the pronunciation produces a complex of phonemes, a more or less musical and interesting sound, a noise, a thing. The untranslated word is like a rock, a piece of wood. Its use, its meaning, is not rational, definite, and limited, but concrete, potential, and infinite. To start with, all the words we say are untranslated words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“Ethical counsel from the Under White Mountain people, far down the eastern coast of the Inland Sea, was not very well received. They advised: ‘Do not fight these sick people, cure them with human behavior,’ to which Rekwit responded tersely, ‘You come up north here and do that.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“They had no god; they had no gods; they had no faith. What they appear to have had is a working metaphor.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“Blue clay, red clay, what does it matter!” he said. “Any fool can dig black mud!”
My mother sat spinning awhile and said at last, “That’s crazy talk.” She laughed again. “If any fool can, why can’t you, my dear?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“This is a mere dream dreamed in a bad time, an Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons, and run prison camps by a middle-aged housewife, a critique of civilisation possible only to the civilised, an affirmation pretending to be a rejection, a glass of milk for the soul ulcered by acid rain, a piece of pacifist jeanjacquerie, and a cannibal dance among the savages in the ungodly garden of the farthest West”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“CÁNTICO DE INICIACIÓN DE LA LOGIA DE LOS BUSCADORES
Trae, por favor, cosas extrañas.
Vuelve, por favor, con cosas nuevas.
Deja que lleguen a tus manos cosas muy antiguas.
Deja que llegue a tus ojos lo que no conoces.
Deja que la arena del desierto endurezca tus pies.
Deja que el arco de tu pie sea las montañas.
Deja que los surcos de las yemas de tus dedos sean los mapas
y que los caminos que recorres sean las líneas de la palma de tus manos.
Deja que entre nieve profunda al inspirar
y que tu aliento sea el fulgor del hielo.
Que tu boca contenga las formas de extrañas palabras.
Que tu olfato huela comidas que nunca has probado.
Que el manantial de un río extraño sea tu ombligo.
Que tu alma esté cómoda donde no hay casas.
Camina con cuidado, bienamado,
camina alerta, bienamado,
camina con valentía, bienamado.
Vuelve con nosotros, vuelve a nosotros,
sigue el eterno regreso a casa.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“This thing is nothing to do with us. This thing is wilderness. The civilised human mind's relationship to it is imprecise, fortuitous and full of risk. There are no shortcuts. All the analogies run in one direction, our direction...The mind can imagine that shadow of a few leaves falling in the wilderness; the mind is a wonderful thing. But what about all the shadows of all the other leaves on all the other branches on all the other scrub oaks on all the other rides of all the wilderness? Could you imagine those for even a moment? What good would it do? Infinite good.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“A New Year's Blessing

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“Most animals stayed in the wilderness with Coyote. Not the ants, though. They wanted to make war with the humans, and they did, and they’re still at it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home (LOA #315): Author's Expanded Edition

“When the artist an the audience are together, collaboration on the work becomes mundane and actual; the work shapes itself in the speaker's voice and the listeners' response together. This powerful relationship can be, and in politics frequently is, abused: the speaker may appropriate the power to himself, dominating and exploiting the audience. When the power of the relationship is used not abused, when the trust is mutual, as when a parent tells a bedtime story or a teacher shares the treasures of the intellect or a poet speaks both to and for the listeners, real community is achieved; the occasion is scared.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“Keeping grows; giving flows.' Giving involves a good deal of discrimination; as a business it requires a more disciplined intelligence that keeping, perhaps...Books are mortal. They die. A book is an act; it takes place in time, not just in space. It is not information, but relation.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“This Stone

He went looking for a road
that doesn't lead to death.
He went looking for that road
and found it.
It was a stone road.
He walked that road
that doesn't lead to death.
He walked on it awhile
before he stopped,
having turned to stone.
Now he stands there on that road
that doesn't lead to death
not going anywhere.
He can't dance.
from his eyes stones fall.
The rainbow people pass him
crossing that road, long-legged, light-stepping,
going from the Four Houses
to the dancing in the Five Houses.
They pick up his tears.
This stone is a tear
from his eye, this stone
given me on the mountain
by one who died before my birth,
this stone, this stone.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“To the Bullock Roseroot

What's the thought you think
all your life long?
It must be a great one,
a solemn one, to make you gaze
through the world at it,
all your life long.
When you have to look aside from it
your eyes roll, you bellow
in anger, anxious
to return to it, steadily
to gaze at it, think it
all your life long.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“Who controls the storage and retrieval [of information]? To what extent is the material there for anyone who wants and needs it, and to what extent is it 'there' only for those who have the information that it is there, the education to obtain that information, and the power to get that education? How many people in your society are literate? How many are computer-competent? How many of them have the competence to use libraries and electronic information storage systems? How much real information is available to ordinary, non-government, nonmilitary, nonspecialist, nonrich people? What does 'classified' mean? What do shredders shred? What does money buy? In a state, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful—another piston in the great machine?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“I am coherent, mysterious, and solid. I sit on dirt in sunlight between the live oaks. Once I was a sun, again I will be dark. Now I am between those great things for a while along with other people, here in the Valley.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home: A Novel

“The difficulty of translation from a language that doesn’t yet exist is considerable, but there’s no need to exaggerate it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“I found at last the town I had been hunting for. After digging in several wrong places for over a year and persisting in several blockheaded opinions - that it must be walled, with one gate, for instance - I was studying yet once more the contours of my map of the region, when it dawned as slowly and certainly as the sun itself upon me that the town was there, between the creeks, under my feet the whole time. And there was never a wall; what on earth did they need a wall for? What I had taken for the gate was the bridge across the meeting of the creeks. And the sacred buildings and the dancing place not in the center of town, for the center is the Hinge, but over in their own arm of the double spiral, the right arm, of course - there in the pasture below the barn. And so it is, and so it is.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“No god no king no One no thing
that comes one at a time
no dupli repli multi identiplication
prolifer proliferation same after same
so no city. Sorry.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home