Powers Quotes

“If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“What a comfort the past is," Mimen said, "when the future offers none.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“Women used and did what there was to use and do, but men shunned and despised a great many things, such as wicker chairs and cooking and storytelling, depriving themselves of many skills and pleasures, in order to prove that they weren't women. Wouldn't it be better to prove it by doing, rather than by not doing?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“The room smelled of books, that subtle smell which to some is stuffy and to others intoxicating, and it was silent.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“I've been looking only at what's to be done next and forgetting why we're doing it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“Freedom is largely a matter of seeing that there are alternatives.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“They were my age, but we’d reached our age by different roads. What”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“The quality and virtue of a slave is invisibility. The powerless need to be invisible even to themselves.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“Writing about our life in the House of Arcamand in the City State of Etra, I fall back into it and see it as I saw it then, from inside and from below, with nothing to compare it to, and as if it were the only way things could possibly be. Children see the world that way. So do most slaves. Freedom is largely a matter of seeing that there are alternatives.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“I could forget everything I'd lost, because I'd never had it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“She told Everra that he had given her and Sallo the soul's hunger for books and thoughts, and must not deprive them now that Sallo was starving among the inanities of the silk rooms and she among the pomposities of merchants and the illiteracy of politicians.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“By that standard, leadership means personal magnetism, active intelligence, unquestioning acceptance of responsibility, and something harder to define: a tension between justice and compassion, which is never satisfied by one without the other, and so can seldom be wholly satisfied.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“Perhaps men rely on war, like politics, to give them a sense of importance they lack without it; and the possibility of violence and destruction sheds a glamour on the household life which they otherwise hold in contempt. Women, I think, not needing the self-importance and not sharing the contempt, often fail to understand the virtue and necessity of warfare; but they may be caught in the glamour, and they love the beauty of courage.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“What's freedom itself but the power of the mind to learn what it needs and think what it likes?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“Three things that, seeking increase, strengthen soul: love, learning, liberty.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“The only emotion I felt was shame. For him, for myself. Again I had trusted, and again I had betrayed and been betrayed. Venne”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it. Now,”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“Justice is in the hands of the gods, an old poet wrote, mortal hands hold only mercy and the sword.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“When you have nothing to pray for, that’s when Luck hears you. If”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“When at last I learned forgetting, I learned it very quickly and all too well.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“I was willing to believe him that most modern writing was trash, on the evidence that so much old writing was trash; but I didn't put it that way to him.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It’s only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“I did not live my life as history is written.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“I had believed that justice could exist in a society founded on injustice.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“some men who live hard and in good health can’t believe sickness or weakness is anything but laziness, a sham.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“ 'They eat their kind,' he said, 'Like men.' ”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

“…what I told them was 'a poem,' a thing made by a maker, a work of art, part history of long ago, part invention.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers