Quotes from le guin ursula k vii

I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.

Where there's property, there's theft.

A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.

In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

The anthropologist cannot always leave his own shadow out of the picture he draws.

Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.

Young he was not, so that one had to call him old, but the word did not suit him.

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love.

Once you have learned to do your dreaming wide awake, to balance your sanity not on the razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think.

It always seemed to me they're sort of alike ... magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.

What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.