Words Are My Matter Quotes

“Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“Realism is for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and convention subject matter. Re-Fi is a repetitive genre written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had any self-respect they'd be writing memoir, but they're too lazy to fact-check. Of course I never read Re-Fi. But the kids keep bringing home these garish realistic novels and talking about them, so I know that it's an incredibly narrow genre, completely centered on one species, full of worn-out cliches and predictable situations--the quest for the father, mother-bashing, obsessive male lust, dysfunctional suburban families, etc., etc. All it's good for is being made into mass-market movies. Given its old-fashioned means and limited subject matter, realism is quite incapable of describing the complexity of contemporary experience.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination. I”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time and silence.

Reading is a means of listening.
Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shout rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you. Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination. […]

Books may not be “books”, of course, they may not be ink on wood pulp but a flicker of electronics in the palm of a hand. Incoherent and commercialized and worm-eaten with porn and hype and blather as it is, electronic publication offers those who read a strong new means of active community. The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people. Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just don’t understand. And incomprehension is boredom.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“No matter how humble the spirit it’s offered in, a sermon is an act of aggression.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“And not only narrativity but the quality of the writing is of the first importance to me. Rightly or not, I believe a dull, inept style signals poverty or incompleteness of thought. I see the accuracy, scope, and quality of Darwin’s intellect directly expressed in the clarity, strength, and vitality of his writing — the beauty of it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“A people that doesn't live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and storytellers, is in a bad way. The center of the world is where you live fully, where you know how things are done, how things are done rightly, done well.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human. We”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“I hold it self-evident that so long as we live in a man’s world, as we still do, women have a right to create enclaves of learning or work where, instead of obeying or imitating what men do and want, women can shape what they do, how they do it, and why they do it, in their own way and on their own terms.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show is how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.
Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn, and then to collaborate in learning and teaching so that we and they can go on the way we think is the right way.
Small communities with strong traditions are often clear about the way they want to go, and good at teaching it. But tradition may crystallize imagination to the point of fossilizing it as dogma and forbidding new ideas. Larger communities, such as cities, open up room for people to imagine alternatives, learn from people of different traditions, and invent their own ways to live.
As alternatives proliferate, however, those who take the responsibility of teaching find little social and moral consensus on way they should be teaching -- what we need, what life ought to be. In our time of huge populations exposed continuously to reproduced voices, images, and words used for commercial and political profit, there are too many people who want to and can invent us, own us, shape and control us through seductive and powerful media. It's a lot to ask of a child to find a way through all that alone.
Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone.
What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“Fantasy, or Phantasy,” Auntie replies, clearing her throat, “is from the Greek phantasia, lit. ‘a making visible.’” And she shows me how “fantasy” in the late Middle Ages meant “the mental apprehension of an object of perception,” the mind’s act of linking itself to the external world, but later came to mean just the reverse: an hallucination, a false perception, or the habit of deluding oneself. And she tells me that the word fantasy also came to mean the imagination itself, “the process,”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“Words are my matter. I have chipped one stone for thirty years and still it is not done, that image of the thing I cannot see. I cannot finish it and set it free, transformed to energy.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“The writer Moe Bowstern gave me a slogan I cherish: “Subversion Through Friendliness.” It looks silly till you think about it. It bears considerable thinking about. Subversion through terror, shock, pain is easy—instant gratification, as it were.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“The writing of fiction is endlessly surprising to the writer.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness -- not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it -- everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not "interactive" with a set of rules or options, as games are: reading is actual collaborating with the writer's mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“To describe society since the mid twentieth century -- global, multilingual, infinitely interlinked -- we need the global, intuitional language of fantasy.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.
Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn, and then to collaborate in learning and teaching so that we and they can go on the way we think is the right way.
Small communities with strong traditions are often clear about the way they want to go, and good at teaching it. But tradition may crystallize imagination to the point of fossilizing it as dogma and forbidding new ideas. Larger communities, such as cities, open up room for people to imagine alternatives, learn from people of different traditions, and invent their own ways to live.
As alternatives proliferate, however, those who take the responsibility of teaching find little social and moral consensus on what they should be teaching -- what we need, what life ought to be. In our time of huge populations exposed continuously to reproduced voices, images, and words used for commercial and political profit, there are too many people who want to and can invent us, own us, shape and control us through seductive and powerful media. It's a lot to ask of a child to find a way through all that alone.
Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone.
What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“A poem of the right shape will hold a thousand truths. But it doesn’t say any of them.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“But the fact is that, starting with Plato’s Republic in Philosophy 1-A when I was seventeen, I read utopias as novels. Actually, I still read everything as novels, including history, memoir, and the newspaper.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“Home isn’t Mom and Dad and Sis and Bud. Home isn’t where they have to let you in. It’s not a place at all. Home is imaginary.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“put it this way: fiction—writing it, reading it—is an act of the imagination.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“While I’m reading a story I want to be able to suspend disbelief; the more questions of authorial reliability force themselves on me, the weaker the hold of the narrative. This is a naïve approach to fiction, granted, but a tough one, since intellect, cleverness, charm, wit, tact, even fact cannot conceal incredibility.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016