The Found and the Lost Quotes

“No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone. Hidden”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“What can you do to evil but refuse it? Not pretend it isn’t there, but look at it, and know it, and refuse it. Punishment, what is punishment? Getting even, schoolboy stuff. The Bible God, vengeance is mine! And then it flips over and goes too far the other way, forgive them for they know not what they do. Who does know? I don’t. But I have tried to know. I don’t forgive a person who doesn’t try to know, doesn’t want to know if he does evil or not. I think in their heart they know what they do, and do it because it is in their power to do it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“The scale is wrong. What can a single human brain achieve against something so vast?” “A single human brain can perceive pattern on the scale of stars and galaxies,” Tomiko said, “and interpret it as Love.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“A key is a little thing next to the door that it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“No normal human being who had experienced time-slippage of even a few decades between League worlds would volunteer for a round trip of centuries. The Surveyors were escapists, misfits. They were nuts. Ten”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“I learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence. By”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“If Rayaye’s men had tortured him and Rayaye pretended ignorance of the fact, Esdan had nothing to gain by insisting on it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“I think that it behooves men to learn to speak the language of the country we live in, not using us to speak for them.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“Wanting praise, not history, the warlords burnt the books in which the poor and powerless might learn what power is.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“My Lord Patterner, will you defy our Rule and our community, that has been one so long, upholding order against the forces of ruin? Will it be you, of all men, who break the pattern?” “It is not glass, to break,” Azver said. “It is breath, it is fire.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Changer stood silent, and then he said quietly, with respect, “My friend, what is it you think to do, to learn? What is she, that you ask this for her?” “Who are we,” said the Doorkeeper, “that we refuse her without knowing what she is?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“That gave her pause. She stood silent. “It’s the name the witch Rose of my village on Way gave me, in the spring under Iria Hill,” she said at last, standing up and speaking truth. The Doorkeeper looked at her for what seemed a long time. “Then it is your name,” he said. “But maybe not all your name. I think you have another.” “I don’t know it, sir.” After another long time she said, “Maybe I can learn it here, sir.” The Doorkeeper bowed his head a little. A very faint smile made crescent curves in his cheeks. He stood aside. “Come in, daughter,” he said.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“My name’s myself. True. But what’s a name, then? It’s what another calls me. If there was no other, only me, what would I want a name for?” “But,” said Dragonfly and stopped, caught by the argument. After a while she said, “So a name has to be a gift?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“Not exactly. I’m merely pointing out that they are all interconnected, both by the root-node linkage and by your green epiphytes in the branches. A linkage of incredible complexity and physical extent. Why, even the prairie grass-forms have those root-connectors, don’t they? I know that sentience or intelligence isn’t a thing, you can’t find it in, or analyze it out from, the cells of a brain. It’s a function of the connected cells. It is, in a sense, the connection: the connectedness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“For a moment he had been borne up on their listening: they heard, so he spoke. He was wholly at their mercy. If they disliked him he had to be hateful; if they mocked him he became grotesque; if they listened to him he was the storyteller. He was helplessly obedient to the demands of their emotions, reactions, moods.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“He had taken the fear into himself, and, accepting, had transcended it. He had given up his self to the alien, an unreserved surrender, that left no place for evil. He had learned the love of the Other, and thereby had been given his whole self.—But this is not the vocabulary of reason.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“A single human brain can perceive pattern on the scale of stars and galaxies,” Tomiko said, “and interpret it as Love.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“But it is not conceivable. That all the biosphere of a planet should be one network of communications, sensitive, irrational, immortal, isolated. . . .”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“They really are the same thing, only, of course, altogether different.”)”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“If you know how, please help me learn not to grieve her joy.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“The lords of war despise scholars and schoolmasters,” said Medra. “I think they fear them too,”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“When one does not read and has not had one’s mind filled up by the images on the nets, words spoken strike down deep in the mind.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“I don’t forgive a person who doesn’t try to know, doesn’t want to know if he does evil or not. I think in their heart they know what they do, and do it because it is in their power to do it. It is their power. It is their power over others, over us.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“I don’t say I was right. I don’t say I was wrong. I was doing what I could.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“I think there’s an evil in us, in humankind. Trust denies it. Leaps across it. Leaps the chasm. But it’s there. And everything we do finally serves evil, because that’s what we are. Greed and cruelty. I look at the world, at the forests and the mountain here, the sky, and it’s all right, as it should be. But we aren’t. People aren’t. We’re wrong. We do wrong. No animal does wrong. How could they? But we can, and we do. And we never stop.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“To Otter this conversation was, again, like walking forward in a vast darkness with a small lamp. Anieb’s understanding was that lamp. Each step revealed the next step he must take, but he could never see the place where he was.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

“If I turned left, east, I could look up a little, and I could see how the rain came, not only in waves as I often see it from the windows of the house, but spaced and crowded together to form columns, like tall white women, immense wraiths hurrying one after another endlessly northward up the beach, as fast as the wind and yet solemn, processional, great grave beings hurrying by.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin