Voices Quotes

“I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house? The tale tells how the Lords of Manva hunted & gathered roots & cooked their suppers while they were camped in exile in the foothills of Sul, but it doesn't say what their wives & children were living on in their city left ruined & desolate by the enemy. They were finding food too, somehow, cleaning house & honoring the gods, the way we did in the siege & under the tyranny of the Alds. When the heroes came back from the mountain, they were welcomed with a feast. I'd like to know what the food was and how the women managed it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“I wonder if men find it easier than women do to consider people not as bodies, as lives, but as numbers, figures, toys of the mind to be pushed about a battleground of the mind. This disembodiment gives pleasure, exciting them and freeing them to act for the sake of acting, for the sake of manipulating the figures, the game pieces. Love of country, or honor, or freedom, then, may be names they give that pleasure to justify it to the gods and to the people who suffer and kill and die in the game. So those words—love, honor, freedom—are degraded from their true sense. Then people may come to hold them in contempt as meaningless, and poets must struggle to give them back their truth.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“The first thing I can remember clearly is writing the way into the secret room.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“Heathen" is merely a word for somebody who knows a different sacredness than you know”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“This is part of what I meant about housework. If it isn't important, what is? If it isn't done honorably, where is honor? Ista”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for—so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“I wonder if men find it easier than women do to consider people not as bodies, as lives, but as numbers, figures, toys of the mind to be pushed about a battleground of the mind. This disembodiment gives pleasure, exciting them and freeing them to act for the sake of acting, for the sake of manipulating the figures, the game pieces. Love of country, or honor, or freedom, then, may be names they give that pleasure to justify it to the gods and to the people who suffer and kill and die in the game.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“generation learns that knowledge is punished and safety lies in ignorance. The next generation doesn’t know they’re”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“The nail's hit once, the hammer a thousand times.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“generation learns that knowledge is punished and safety lies in ignorance. The next generation doesn't know they're ignorant, because they don't know what knowledge was.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“to read the oracle is to bring rational thought to an impenetrable mystery”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices