The Unreal and the Real Quotes

“I don't know. I love the idea of democracy, the hope, yes, I love that. I couldn't live without that. But the country? You mean the thing on the map, lines, everything inside the lines is good and nothing outside them matters? How can an adult love such a childish idea?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth

“You can keep up that crap for years. But it finally catches up with you. And then you realise all you've done is save your shit to drown in.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth

“Everyone is important,” Sue said “I learned that this summer.”
Was that the truth that the croaking voice had gasped at torture’s end? She didn’t believe it. Nobody was important. But she couldn’t say that. It would sound as cheap, as stupid, as the stupid professor. But the pebble wasn’t important, neither was she, neither was Sue. Neither was the sea. Important wasn’t the point. Things didn’t have rank.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth

“Consistency is a virtue until it gets annoying.”
― ursula le guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume One: Where on Earth

“One of the rocks in my soulbag, a little grey rock that I had picked up on a certain day in a certain place in the hills above the river in the Silver Time, a little piece of my world, that became my world. |Every night I took it out and held it in my hand while I lay in bed waiting to sleep, thinking of the sunlight on the hills above the river, listening to the soft shushing of the ship’s systems, like a mechanical sea”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth

“One of the rocks in my soulbag, a little grey rock that I had picked up on a certain day in a certain place in the hills above the river in the Silver Time, a little piece of my world, that became my world. |Every night I took it out and held it in my hand while I lay in bed waiting to sleep, thinking of the sunlight on the hills above the river, listening to the soft shushing of the ship’s systems, like a mechanical sea.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth

“He would go forward in the same, splendid, vulnerable integrity of body and mind towards whatever came to meet him on his road”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth

“It was not what he had meant to say, not what he had wanted to say. He had wanted Kostant to talk. But words fell out of his own mouth and bounced around him like hailstones.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth

“Consistency is a virtue until it gets annoying”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth