“I got a questionnaire from Harvard for the sixtieth reunion of the Harvard graduating class of 1951 […] Question 14: ‘Are you living your secret desires?’ Floored. I finally didn’t check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in ‘I have none, my desires are flagrant.’”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Tag: today
On the edge of the mountain a cloud hangs
and my heart
my heart
my heart hangs with it.Ursula K. Le Guin, from “Wild Oats and Fireweed,” Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2010 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
Ursula K. Le Guin, from ‘A Few words to a Young Writer’
(via soracities)
(via soracities)
HUFFLEPUFF: “I know that there is only one power worth having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept. Not to have, but to give.” –Ursula K. Le Guin (Ged: The Farthest Shore)
GRYFFINDOR: “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make it. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” -Ursula K Le Guin
RAVENCLAW: “These moments of fear and darkness, he said to himself, were the shadows merely of his ignorance. The more he learned, the less he would have to fear, until finally in his full power as Wizard he need fear nothing in the world, nothing at all.” –Ursula K. Le Guin (A Wizard of Earthsea)
Ursula K. Le Guin.
SLYTHERIN:
“ARCHMAGE: Whose will sent you here?
GED: My own.”-Ursula K Le Guin (A Wizard of Earthsea)
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World (via quotespile)
Soon after A Wizard of Earthsea came out in England it received a review in a science-fiction periodical which took the book to task for being “consolatory” and “reassuring”. Well, fair enough, I thought, if the consolation is false, if the reassurance is unwarranted; but are consolation and reassurance inherently false, unwarranted — foolish, soft, silly, childish — sentimental? Are we writers only to threaten, terrify, and depress our readers with our ruthless honesty: have we not as good a right to offer them whatever comfort we’ve come by honestly?
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