Annals of the Western Shore Quotes

“even if your body’s chained, if you have the thoughts of the philosophers and the words of the poets in your head, you can be free of your chains, and walk among the great!”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin: Annals of the Western Shore

“Your soul knows it—not your mind. It doesn’t matter what your mind doesn’t know, if your soul knows. So you are a reproach to Gegemer. You darken her heart.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin: Annals of the Western Shore

“I had been unwilling to see. I had blinded my eyes with belief. I had believed that the rule of the master and the obedience of the slave were a mutual and sacred trust. I had believed that justice could exist in a society founded on injustice.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin: Annals of the Western Shore

“had been unwilling to see. I had blinded my eyes with belief. I had believed that the rule of the master and the obedience of the slave were a mutual and sacred trust. I had believed that justice could”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin: Annals of the Western Shore

“Once you remove the firm foundation of belief on which all our lives are built, there is nothing. Only words! Gorgeous, empty words. You can’t live on words, Gavir. Only belief gives life and peace. All morality is founded upon belief.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin: Annals of the Western Shore

“If it meant anything, it meant people who don’t know what’s sacred. Are there any such people? “Heathen” is merely a word for somebody who knows a different sacredness than you know.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin: Annals of the Western Shore

“This is part of what I meant about housework. If it isn’t important, what is? If it isn’t done honorably, where is honor?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin: Annals of the Western Shore

“GRIEVING, LIKE BEING blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone. How you bear it is up to you. Or so it seems to me. Maybe in saying so I’m ungrateful to Gry, and to the people of the house and domain, my companions, without whom I might not have carried my burden through the dark year.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin: Annals of the Western Shore

“I had no sense of the sacredness of a story, or rather they were all sacred to me, the wonderful word-beings which, so long as I was hearing or telling them, made a world I could enter seeing, free to act: a world I knew and understood, that had its own rules, yet was under my control as the world beyond the stories was not. In the boredom and inactivity of my blindness, I lived increasingly in these stories, remembering them, asking my mother to tell them, and going on with them myself, giving them form, speaking them into being as the Spirit did in Chaos.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin: Annals of the Western Shore

“Then the Spirit gathered itself together and drew breath, and spoke. It said everything that was to be. It sang to the earth and fire and water and air, singing all the creatures into being. All the shapes of mountains and rivers, the shapes of trees, and animals, and men. Only it took no shape itself, and gave itself no name, so that it could remain everywhere, in all things and between all things, in every relation and every direction. When everything is unmade at the end and Chaos returns, the Spirit will be in it as it was in the beginning.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin: Annals of the Western Shore