URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

URSULA K. LE GUIN
“Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading”
Harper’s Magazine, February 2008

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.

ALBERT CAMUS
The Rebel

What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.

Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right. The rebel says yes and no simultaneously In every act of rebellion, the rebel simultaneously experiences a feeling of revulsion at the infringement of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself.

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URSULA K. LE GUIN

Let not the gendered language detract or distract from the lucidity of Camus’s wisdom, for it is a function of his era

URSULA K. LE GUIN

____________________

I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. Solitude is non-communication, the absence of others, the presence of a self-sufficiency unto to itself.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Lathe of Heaven

____________________

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

A Wizard of Earthsea

____________________

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

____________________

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words. 

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

____________________

Light is the left hand of darkness

and darkness the right hand of light.

Two are one, life and death, lying

together like lovers in kemmer,

like hands joined together,

like the end and the way.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

____________________

A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.

URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed

____________________

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. 

In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.

THE DISPOSSESSED

____________________

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Originally published in 1974.

 

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

____________________

A man wants his virility regarded. A woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. Here one is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

____________________

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truth teller.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

____________________

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
____________________

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. 

…. or ….

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

____________________

How does one hate a country, or love one? I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of [my country], but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope. 

URSULA K. LE GUIN 

The Left Hand of Darkness

____________________

How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?

What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”

____________________

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

URSULA K. LE GUIN from The Left Hand of Darkness

Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.