Lavinia Quotes

“Not even need and love can defeat fate...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“Without war there are no heroes."

"What harm would that be?"

"Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“Aeneas' mother is a star?"

"No; a goddess."

I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus."

He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. "So do we, he said. "But Venus also became more...With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite...There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light..."

It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write. I'm not sure of the nature of my existence, and wonder to find myself writing.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn’t be given, wouldn’t be taken, but chose my man and my fate.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“We are all contingent. Resentment is foolish and ungenerous, and even anger is inadequate. I am a fleck of light on the surface of the sea, a glint of light from the evening star. I live in awe. If I never lived at all, yet I am a silent wing on the wind, a bodiless voice in the forest of Albunea. I speak, but all I can say is: Go, go on.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“I think if you have lost a great happiness and try to recall it, you are only asking for sorrow, but if you do not try to dwell on the happiness, sometimes you find it dwelling in your heart and body, silent but sustaining.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't "get into" me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.

The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names--Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the storm cloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren't people. They don't love and hate, they aren't for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“I went to the springs while the sun was still up, and sitting on a rocky outcrop above the cave mouth I watched the light grow reddish across the misty pools, and listened to the troubled voice of the water. After a while I moved farther up the hill, where I could hear birds singing near and far in the silence of the trees. The presence of the trees was very strong...The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“Perhaps women have more complicated selves. They know how to do more than one thing at one time. That comes late to men. If at all.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“There was room for them. A great deal of Italy, back then, was forest. Where man goes, trees die; or, to paraphrase Tacitus, we make a desert and call it progress.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“There's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“I remember Aeneas’ words as I remember the poet’s words. I remember every word because they are the fabric of my life, the warp I am woven on. All my life since Aeneas’ death might seem a weaving torn out of the loom unfinished, a shapeless tangle of threads making nothing, but it is not so; for my mind returns as the shuttle returns always to the starting place, finding the pattern, going on with it. I was a spinner, not a weaver, but I have learned to weave.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“his story told of the king’s daughter Cassandra, who foresaw what would happen and tried to prevent the Trojans from letting the great horse into the city, but no one would listen to her: it was a curse laid on her, to see the truth and say it and not be heard. It is a curse laid on women more often than on men. Men want the truth to be theirs, their discovery and property.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“I came to the center of the maze following him. Now I must find my way back out alone.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“Why, why is a girl brought up at home to be a woman in exile the rest of her life?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“It’s a good place for a child, the woods. You don’t learn much about people, but you learn silence. Patience. And that there’s nothing much to fear in the wilderness—less than there is on a farm or in the city.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“We’re a rough people, born of oak, as they say, here in the western land; tempers run high, weapons are always at hand.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“Why must there be war?" "Oh Lavinia, what a woman's question that is! Because men are men.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“Because I did see him. And not you. You’re almost nothing in my poem, almost nobody. An unkept promise. No mending that now, no filling your name with life, as I filled Dido’s. But it’s there, that life ungiven, there, in you. So now, at the end, when it’s too late, you have it to give to me.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“The moths look like souls in the underworld,”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“I had not learned how peace galls men, how they gather impatient rage against it as it continues, how even while they pray the powers for peace, they work against it and make certain it will be broken and give way to battle, slaughter, rape, and waste.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

“I will not, I cannot tell much in detail of the three years of our marriage, for my mind holds me back from speaking much of those doings and undertakings that seemed of such importance to us and filled our days so full. And indeed they were important both to us and to our people; and they have filled my life, not only then but ever since, completing me, so that though I knew the bitter grief of widowhood, I seldom felt the utter emptiness. I think if you have lost a great happiness and try to recall it, you are only asking for sorrow, but if you do not try to dwell on the happiness, sometimes you find it dwelling in your heart and body, silent but sustaining. The purest, most completest happiness I know is that of a baby at the breast and the mother giving suck. From that I know what perfect fulfillment is. But I cannot regain it by remembering, by speaking, by yearning. To have known it is enough, and all.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia