The Wind's Twelve Quarters Quotes

“We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“I don't know. We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Yes, that he will. There's the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?' From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“Life loves to know itself, out to its furthest limits; to embrace complexity is its delight. Our difference is our beauty.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“This was a great magic. Festin had no more performed it than has any man who in exile or danger longs for the earth and waters of his home, seeing and yearning over the doorsill of his house, the table where he has eaten, the branches outside the window of the room where he has slept. Only in dreams do any but the great Mages realize this magic of going home.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“Of course I didn't read James and sit down and say, Now I'll write a story about that “lost soul.” It seldom works that simply.

I sat down and started a story, just because I felt like it, with nothing but the word “Omelas” in mind. It came from a road sign: Salem (Oregon) backwards. Don't you read road signs backwards? POTS. WOLS nerdlihc. Ocsicnarf Nas... Salem equals schelomo equals salaam equals Peace. Melas. O melas. Omelas. Homme helas.

“Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“Mede stood accused of heresy. He had been seen out on the fields pointing an instrument at the Sun, a device, they said, for measuring distances. He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“No harmony endures,” said the young king. “None has ever been achieved,” said the Plenipotentiary. “The pleasure is in trying.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“Professor Barry Pennywither sat in a cold, shadowy garret and stared at the table in front of him, on which lay a book and a breadcrust. The bread had been his dinner, the book had been his lifework. Both were dry.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic “libertarianism” of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“Gerçekliğin korkunç adaletini anlamaya başlayıp kabullenince bu acı adaletsizlik için akıttıkları gözyaşları kurur. Yine de gözyaşları ve öfkeleri, iyiliklerini sınamaları ve çaresizliklerini kabullenmeleridir belki de yaşamlarındaki ihtişamın gerçek kaynağı. Mutlulukları ruhsuz, sorumsuz bir mutluluk değildir. Çocuk gibi kendilerinin de özgür olmadıklarını bilirler. Duygudaşlığı bilirler.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There’s the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“Ebediyet beni ilgilendirmez. Ben bir meşeyim, ne bir eksik ne bir fazla. Bir görevim var ve yerine getiriyorum; hoşlandığım şeyler var ve onlardan keyif alıyorum. Gerçi sayıca azaldılar. Çünkü kuşlar da azaldı. Hem, rüzgâr da berbat kokuyor artık. Tamam, uzun ömürlüyüm ama benim de geçici bir şey olmaya hakkım var. Ölümlü olma ayrıcalığım var. Oysa bu ayrıcalık elimden alındı.
...
Dünya da ölümü gözleriyle görmek isteyen varsa bu onların sorunu, benim değil. Onlar için Ebediyet'i oynayamam. Ölüm isteyen, ağaçlara başvurmasın. Görmek istedikleri o ise, birbirlerinin gözlerine baksınlar ve ölümü orada görsünler.

│ Rüzgarın On İki Yakası - Yolun Yönü”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“En aquellos últimos años solitarios de la mitad de su vida, lo afligía una sensación de desperdicio, de fuerza retenida; y como necesitaba aprender a ser paciente, había dejado los poblados y se había ido a conversar con los árboles, especialmente con los robles, los castaños y los alisos grises cuyas raíces están en profunda comunicación con el agua corriente.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“Los números son el corazón de su conocimiento, su lenguaje. [...] con la cabeza aturdida por las dieciséis horas de matemáticas sin haber comido o descansado; había perdido el miedo, la humildad. Su sonrisa era la de un rey que regresa del exilio.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“[...] mi estilo ha progresado, alejándose lenta y continuamente del franco romanticismo. [..] el candor y la inocencia de "El collar de Semley" se han convertido gradualmente en algo más fuerte, más duro y más complejo.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“The eye is a delicate instrument, but it is blind to half the universe—far more than half. The night sky is black, we say: between the stars is void and darkness. But turn the telescope-eye on that space between the stars, and lo, the stars! Stars too faint and far for the eye alone to see, rank behind rank, glory beyond glory, out to the uttermost boundaries of the universe. Beyond all imagination, in the outer darkness, there is light: a great glory of sunlight. I have seen it. I have seen it, night after night, and mapped the stars, the beacons of God on the shores of darkness. And here too there is light! There is no place bereft of the light, the comfort and radiance of the creator spirit. There is no place that is outcast, outlawed, forsaken. There is no place left dark. Where the eyes of God have seen, there light is. We must go farther, we must look farther! There is light if we will see it. Not with eyes alone, but with the skill of the hands and the knowledge of the mind and the heart's faith is the unseen revealed, and the hidden made plain. And all the dark earth shines like a sleeping star.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“But will you drag civilization down into the mud? cried the shocked decent people, later on, and she had tried for years to explain to them that if all you had was mud, then if you were God you made it into human beings, and if you were human you tried to make it into houses where human beings could live. But nobody who thought he was better than mud would understand.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“If you wanted to come home you had to keep going on, that was what she meant when she wrote “True journey is return,”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“A proper body’s not an object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it’s just you, yourself. Only when it’s no longer you, but yours, a thing owned, do you worry about it— Is it in good shape? Will it do? Will it last?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“To weave some harmony among them, at least. Life loves to know itself, out to its furthest limits; to embrace complexity is its delight. Our difference is our beauty. All these worlds and the various forms and ways of the minds and lives and bodies on them—together they would make a splendid harmony.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“And I find made-up pronouns, “te” and “heshe” and so on, dreary and annoying.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“Many feminists have been grieved or aggrieved by The Left Hand of Darkness because the androgynes in it are called “he” throughout. In the third person singular, the English generic pronoun is the same as the masculine pronoun. A fact worth reflecting upon.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“El ocio es un estado natural y bendito".”
― Ursual K. LeGuin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“This story is about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“Shelley was kicked out of Oxford—I think the story is unauthenticated, but who cares—because he painted a sign on the end wall of a dead-end alley: THIS WAY TO HEAVEN. I feel that every now and then his sign needs repainting.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters