Changing Planes Quotes

“The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“Whatever language we speak, before we begin a sentence we have an almost infinite choice of words to use. A, The, They, Whereas, Having, Then, To, Bison, Ignorant, Since, Winnemucca, In, It, As . . . Any word of the immense vocabulary of English may begin an English sentence. As we speak or write the sentence, each word influences the choice of the next ― its syntactical function as noun, verb, adjective, etc., its person and number if a pronoun, its tense and number as a verb, etc. ,etc. And as the sentence goes on, the choices narrow, until the last word may very likely be the only one we can use.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“There are talking dogs all over the place, unbelievably boring they are, on and on and on about sex and shit and smells, and smells and shit and sex, and do you love me, do you love me, do you love me.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird feeder.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“...I, like Borges, think of heaven as something very like a library”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“Indeed it can be seen as our human essence, how few behavioral imperatives we follow. How flexible we are in finding new things to do, new ways to go. How ingeniously, inventively, desperately we seek the right way, the true way, the Way we believe we lost long ago among the thickets of novelty and opportunity and choice...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“The Encyclopedia Planaria, in forty-four volumes, is not portable, and after all, what is entirely reliable unless it's dead?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“I am not sure who I am," I said cautiously.

"Many people never are," she said. "But it doesn't matter, you know. If for one moment of your whole life you know that you are, then that's your life, that moment, that's unnua, that's all. In a short life I saw my mother's face, like the sun. So I'm here. In a long life I went there and there and there; but I dug in the garden, the root of a weed came up in my hand, so I am unnua. When you get old, you know, you keep being here instead of there, everything is here. Everything is here," she repeated.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?
In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of any meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“I hate complaining to strangers -- you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“She didn't even ask me if I was going to go on flying. She knew I would. I don't understand the people who have wings and don't use them. I suppose they're interested in having a career. Maybe they were already in love with somebody on the ground. But it seems… I don't know. I can't really understand it. Wanting to stay down. Choosing not to fly. Wingless people can't help it, it's not their fault they're grounded. But if you have wings...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“He also had a kind of helpless politeness, which I took advantage of. He was quite incapable of refusing a direct request, and so, because I asked him to, he invited me to several parties during the month I stayed in Hemgogn.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“I found an entry for the Beidr, of the Unon Plane, an aggressive and enterprising people with highly advanced material technologies, who have been in trouble more than once with the Interplanary Agency for interfering on other planes. The tourist guidebook gives them the symbols that mean “of special interest to engineers, computer programmers, and systems analysts.”)”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes: Stories

“An early visitor described a Veksi village as “five big houses full of women swearing at each other and fourteen little houses full of men sulking.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes: Stories

“I hate complaining to strangers—you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well—”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes: Stories

“In this they resemble any reasonable being who does an unreasonable thing and justifies it with reasons. War, for example. My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war. Our most rational and scientific justifications-for instance, that we are an aggressive species-are perfectly circular: we make war because we make war. Our justifications for making a particular war (such as: our people must have more land and more wealth, or: our people must have more power, or: our people must obey out deity's orders to crush the sacrilegious infidel) all come down to the same thing: we must make war because we must. We have no choice. We have no freedom. This argument is not ultimately satisfactory to the reasoning mind, which desires freedom.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“The fact that the Hegnish have absolutely no interest in any people except themselves can also cause offense, or even rage. Foreigners exist. That is all the Hegnish know about them, and all they care to know. They are too polite to say that it is a pity that foreigners exist, but if they had to think about it, they would think so.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“There are gates the bravest horse can't jump. If wishes were horses, I'd have a whole herd of them, roan and buckskin, lovely wild horses, never bridled, never broken, galloping over the plains past red mesas and blue mountains. But cowards ride rocking horses made of wood with painted eyes, and back and forth they go, back and forth in one place on the playroom floor, back and forth, and all the plains and mesas and mountains are only in the rider's eyes.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“Bir kişiliğe sahip olabilmek için kişinin aynı zamanda bir hiç olması gerekir. Kişinin kendini bilmesi için, hiçbir şey bilmemesi gerekir. Uykusuzlar dünyayı hemen ve sürekli bilirler; hiç boş zamanları, kişilik için hiç boş alanları yoktur. Hiç rüyaları olmadığı için hiç hikâye anlatmazlar ve lisanı kullanmazlar. Lisanları olmadığından yalanları da yoktur. Böylece gelecekleri de bulunmaz. Burada, şimdi ve son derece bağlantılı yaşarlar. Saf bir gerçeklik içinde yaşarlar. Ama hakikati yaşayamazlar çünkü hakikate olan yol, filozofun dediği üzere, yalanlardan ve rüyalardan geçer.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“Mutlu olduğunuzun bilincinde değilseniz mutlu sayılır mısınız? ...Filozoflardan daha fazla kertenkele vardır. O halde kertenkeleler filozoflardan daha başarılı bir tür müdür?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“...ama ağıtları suçlamalardan, hüzünleri ise hiddetten ibaretti.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“Hayvanlarla birlikte yaşayan insanlar, dilsizliğin büyüsüne değer verirler. Bir kedinin odaya girdiğinde sizin kusurlarınızdan bahsetmeyeceğini veya köpeğinize dert yandığınızda gidip bunu dertleri yaratanlara anlatmayacağını bilmek, gerçek bir keyiftir.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“Her tarafta konuşan köpeklerden var, inanılmayacak kadar sıkıcı şeyler, durmadan, hiç durmadan cinsellikten, boktan ve kokudan; kokudan, boktan ve cinsellikten konuşurlar ve sürekli sorarlar, beni seviyor musun, beni seviyor musun, beni seviyor musun?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

“People picked up burning knots and embers with their bare hands and hurled them into the pyre, shouting and screaming in what appeared to be pure, uncontrolled rage. The dead man’s granddaughter yelled over and over, “How could you do this to me? How could you go and die? You didn’t really love me! I’ll never forgive you!”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes: Stories