Ursula K. Le Guin: Making

Ursula K. Le Guin was American writer. Explore interesting quotes on making.
Ursula K. Le Guin: 584 quotes22 likes

“When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. or wonder who, after all, you are.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 3, "Hort Town" (Ged)

“War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to 'a war against' whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Afterword to the 2012 edition.
Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)

“I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that I when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I lived, the breath I breathed.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Other Wind (2001), Chapter 5, “Rejoining” (p. 286)

““We may suffer for it when the balance of things rights itself, but we do not lose hope and forego art and forget the words of the Making. Nature is not unnatural. This is not a righting of the balance, but an upsetting of it. There is only one creature who can do that.”
“A man?” Arren said, tentative.
“We men.”
“How?”
“By an unmeasured desire for life.”
“For life? But it isn’t wrong to want to live?”
“No. But when we crave power over life—endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.””

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 3, "Hort Town" (Ged and Arren)

“Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?”

Ursula K. Le Guin book Lavinia

Source: Lavinia (2008), p. 66

“You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit or, it is nowhere.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 9 (p. 301)

“I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 1 “A Parade in Ehrenrang” (p. 1; opening paragraph)

“For heroes do not make history—that is the historians’ 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

The Lady of Moge (p. 183)
Short fiction, Orsinian Tales (1976)