Quotes from le guin ursula k iii

No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.

One must work with time and not against it.

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. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?

Dreams take short cuts.

What is more arrogant than honesty?

I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.

Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.

A person who believes ... that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.

Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners.

A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.

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