Orsinian Tales Quotes

“For heroes do not make history—that is the historian’s job—but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales

“I think… most women marry to get their freedom."

"Then they want less than I do. There’s something inside me, in my heart, a brightness and a heaviness, how can I describe it? Something that exists and does not yet exist, which is mine to carry, and not mine to give up to any man.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales

“There was no more room in the world for whole people, they took up too much space. What she had done to him was only a part of the general program for cutting him and people like him down to size, for chopping and paring and breaking up, so that in the texture of life nothing large, nothing hard, nothing grand should remain.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales

“I was afraid I'd fail. So I didn't work.'

And there it was, plain as a glass of water, the truth, which he had never admitted to himself.

”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales

“They say one gets used to being a millionaire; so after a year or two a human being begins to get used to being a woman.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales

“Prevne was crawling with agents, he went, even if you went to buy a newspaper your identification was checked. "Easier to have it tattooed on, like you," said Kasimir, "Move your foot, Stefan."—"Move your fat rump, then."—" Oh, mine are German numbers, out of date. A few more wars and I'll run out of skin." --- "Shed it, then, like a snake."---No, they go right down to the bone." --- Shed your bones, then," Stefan said, *be a jellyfish. Be an amoeba. When they pin me down, I bud off. Two little spineless Stefans where they thought they had one MR 64100282A. Four of them, eight, sixteen thirty-two sixty-four a hundred and twenty-eight, I would entirely cover the surface of the globe were it not for my natural enemies.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales

“It might derail and we'll all be killed. And if we do come to Aisnar? What's Aisnar? Mere hearsay.-—"That's morbid," Kasimir said, glimpsing again the walls collapsing.-—"No, exhilarating," his friend answered. "Takes a lot of work to hold the world together, when you look at it that way. But it's worthwhile. Building up cities, holding up the roofs by an act of fidelity. Not faith. Fidelity.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales

“. . . all delight being in the present and its past, all truth too, and all fidelity in the word, the flesh, the present moment: for the future, however you look at it, contains only one sure thing and that is death. But the moment is unpredictable.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales