The Unreal and the Real Quotes

“Staking everything on it,” the next voice took up the story, “because nothing works except what we give our souls to, nothing’s safe except what we put at risk.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“Summer was long, clear, beautiful. I was learning to starwatch; that is when you lie down outside on the open hills in the dry season at night, and find a certain star in the eastern sky, and watch it cross the sky till it sets. You can look away, of course, to rest your eyes, and doze, but you try to keep looking back at the star and the stars around it, until you feel the earth turning, until you become aware of how the stars and the world and the soul move together. After the certain star sets you sleep until dawn wakes you. Then as always you greet the sunrise with aware silence. I was very happy on the hills those warm great nights, those clear dawns.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“What I know is this, I am going to love people. They will never know it. But I am going to be a great lover. I know how. I have practiced.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“Solitude” was written because I wanted to write about an introvert who finds a good place for introverts to live. Clearly it had to be on another world, because the World As We Know It is filled almost solid with extraverts, who refuse to learn how to spell “extravert” because they’re too busy rushing around in crowds shouting and cellphoning and texting and friending and joining groups and being outgoing and sociable to pay any attention to stuff like Latin prefixes, or silence, or introverts.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“What if art is not communicative?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“Always, always, the young men were ready to rush out and kill whoever the old men told them to kill, each other, women, old people, children; always there was a war to be fought in the name of Peace, Freedom, Justice, the Lord.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“Why should they have sympathy? That’s one of the things you give because you need it back.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy langour, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“A scientific question, not yet fully and satisfactorily answered: When a few males would serve to procreate a species, why are there so many? And a social question, not yet answered adequately at all: Why, in almost all societies, do men dominate women? What’s the Darwinian profit in having equal numbers of the two genders but making them unequal in power? What if the situation were reversed?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“It is the American way to buy and sell houses and properties continually in the course of moving for the sake of upward mobility and self-improvement. Stagnation is the enemy of the American way. The same person owning the same property since 1906 is unnatural and Unamerican.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“But now I have my own question. I never asked questions, I was so busy answering them, but am sixty years old this winter and think I should have time for a question. But it’s hard to ask. Here it is. It’s like all the time I was working keeping house and raising the kids and making love and earning our keep I thought there was going to come a time or there would be some place where all of it all came together. Like it was words I was saying, all my life, all the kinds of work, just a word here and a word there, but finally all the words would make a sentence, and I could read the sentence. I would have made my soul and know what it was for. But I have made my soul and I don’t know what to do with it. Who wants it? I have lived sixty years. All I’ll do from now on is the same as what I have done only less of it, while I get weaker and sicker and smaller all the time, shrinking and shrinking around myself, and die. No matter what I did, or made, or know. The words don’t mean anything.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“But now I have my own question. I never asked questions, I was so busy answering them, but am sixty years old this winter and think I should have time for a question. But it’s hard to ask. Here it is. It’s like all the time I was working keeping house and raising the kids and making love and earning our keep I thought there was going to come a time or there would be some place where all of it all came together. Like it was words I was saying, all my life, all the kinds of work, just a word here and a word there, but finally all the words would make a sentence, and I could read the sentence. I would have made my soul and know what it was for.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“I have read the term “a crusty old bachelor” and would be willing to say that that describes me so long as the crust goes all the way through. I don’t like things soft in the center. Softness is no use in this hard world. I am like one of my mother’s biscuits.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“He said, “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?” “But you wouldn’t betray the nation to an outside enemy.” He said, “Well, if it was a choice between the nation and humanity, or the nation and a friend, I might. If you call that betrayal. I call it morality.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“Occupation by money, materialism, their markets, their values, you don’t think we can hold out against them, do you? What’s social justice to a color TV set?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Lord keeps the house and knows his servants. If he had sent this innocent and splendid man to live obscure on the plain of stone, it was part of his housekeeping, of the strange economy of the stone and the rose, the rivers that run and do not run dry, the tiger, the ocean, the maggot, and the not eternal stars.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“reality is often best represented slantwise,”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“He had not become violent, though his behavior had been what Hansen termed “extraordinarily wilful.” Later on, in private, Hansen wondered whether Gideon’s behavior had not always been wilful, in that it had always been self-directed, and whether he should not have used, instead, the word “irrational.” That would have been the expectable word. But its expectability led him to wonder if Gideon’s behavior (as a theoretical physicist) had ever been rational; and, in fact, if his own behavior (as a theoretical physicist, or otherwise) had ever been adequately describable by the term “rational.” He said nothing, however, of these speculations, and worked very hard for several weekends at building a rock garden at the side of his house.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“mauve”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“Her face was plump, pink, round-eyed, and Rita had to make the interpretation “intellectual” consciously. It would not arise of itself from the pink face, the high voice, the girlish manner, as it would from the pink face, high voice, and boyish manner of a male counterpart.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“None of your business, Pugh thought, but said, “No, it’s his dialect, not mine: Argentinean”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“FOR A WRITER, THERE IS a genuine difference between fantasy and science fiction, which has nothing to do with the commercial branding of books as “genre” or the categorical imperatives of critics. The difference is in how you write it—what you are doing as a writer. In fantasy you get to make it all up, even the rules of how things work, and then follow your rules absolutely. In science fiction you get to make it up, but you have to follow most of the rules of science, or at least not ignore them.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

“The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy;”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin