“It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.” — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Justice is in the hands of the gods, an old poet wrote, mortal hands hold only mercy and the sword.” — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“…what I told them was 'a poem,' a thing made by a maker, a work of art, part history of long ago,… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Boris Pasternak said that poetry makes itself from the relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words.” — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“A people that doesn't live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and storytellers, is in… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Offering I made a poem going to sleep last night, woke in sunlight, it was clean forgotten. If it was any good,… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Well," he said slowly, "sometimes there's a passion that comes in its springtime to ill fate or death. And because it ends… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Aeneas' mother is a star?" "No; a goddess." I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“...I wore his blood for clothing, on my legs and thighs and hands: a dry, stiff, brown garment with no warmth in it.” — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share
“Aeneas' mother is a star?" "No; a goddess." I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share
“Meaning - this is perhaps the common note, the bane I am seeking. What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share
For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share
“. . . chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share
“If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share
Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share
I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share
“I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share
To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share
“Hector had no virtue?” “Of course he did. He won all his battles, till the last one.” “We all do,” Aeneas remarked.” — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share
“I was willing to believe him that most modern writing was trash, on the evidence that so much old writing was trash; but I… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share
“Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men?” — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share
