The Word for World Is Forest Quotes

“Sometimes a god comes," Selver said. "He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“But even the most unmissionary soul, unless he pretend he has no emotions, is sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. 'What are they doing?' abruptly becomes, 'What are we doing?' and then, 'What must I do?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“I don’t know. Do men kill men, except in madness? Does any beast kill its own kind? Only the insects. These yumens kill us as lightly as we kill snakes. The one who taught me said that they kill one another, in quarrels, and also in groups, like ants fighting. I haven’t seen that. But I know they don’t spare one who asks life. They will strike a bowed neck, I have seen it! There is a wish to kill in them, and therefore I saw fit to put them to death.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“The world is always new,” said Coro Mena, “however old its roots.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

“In diversity is life and where there's life there's hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“You have not thought things through,” he said. By his standards it was a brutal insult.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

“Can you walk the road your dream goes?
Sometimes. Sometimes I am afraid to.
Who is not.
...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“The most winning characteristic of the rather harsh Cetian temperament was curiosity, inopportune, and inexhaustible curiosity; Cetians died eagerly, curious as to what came next.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the World. So Earth, Terra, meant both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

“I don’t know what ‘human nature’ is. Maybe leaving descriptions of what we wipe out is part of human nature.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“Had his fear, in fact, been the personal fear that Selver might having learnt the racial hatred, reject him and treat him not as you but as one of them.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“You gave me a gift, the killing of one’s kind, murder. Now, as well as I can, I give you my people’s gift, which is not killing. I think we each find each other’s gift heavy to carry. However, you must carry it alone.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“But old women are different from everybody else, they say what they think.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

“For the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“No way was clear, no light unbroken, in the forest. Into wind, water, sunlight, starlight, there always entered leaf and branch, bole and root, the shadowy, the complex.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

“So he made his choice without even knowing he had made one.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

“In diversity is life and where there's life there's hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest! one to be sure.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“Maybe after I die people will be as they were before I was born, and before you came. But I do not think they will.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

“This is the dream now, the evil dream. I thought to drive it, but it drives me.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

“The fine rain, falling unseen in darkness, pattered on the leaves overhead, on his arms and neck and head protected by their thick silk-fine hair, on the earth and ferns and undergrowth nearby, on all the leaves of the forest, near and far. Selver sat as quiet as the gray owl on a branch above him, unsleeping, his eyes wide open in the rainy dark.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

“The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he's just had a woman or just killed another man. That wasn't original, he'd read it in some old books; but it was true. That was why he liked to imagine scenes like that. Even if the creechies weren't actually men.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“Ugly as hell, but it was the sort of thing only women would do to their hair, and so it was provocative.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

“If the yumens are men, they are men unfit or untaught to dream and to act as men.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Word for World Is Forest

“Touch was a main channel of communication among the forest people. Among Terrans touch is always likely to imply threat, aggression, and so for them there is often nothing between the formal handshake and the sexual caress. All that blank was filled by the Athsheans with varied customs of touch.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

“I thought I was inventing my own lot of imaginary aliens​, and I was only describing the Senoi. It is not only th Captain Davidsons who can be found in the unconscious, if one looks. The quiet people who do not kill each other are there, too. It seems that a great deal is there, the things we most fear (and therefore deny), the things we most need (and therefore deny). I wonder, couldn't we start listening to our dreams, and our children dreams? "Where did you fall to, and what did you discover?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

“Only a god could lead so great a newcomer as Death across the bridge between the worlds.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest