{"author":"Ursula K. Le Guin","author_id":"Ursula+K.+Le+Guin","total_quotes":387,"quotes":[{"text":"They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, 'Arek!' Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark.","author":"Ursula K. Le Guin","tags":["death","fugitive","love","prison"],"id":42,"author_id":"Ursula+K.+Le+Guin"},{"text":"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.","author":"Ursula K. Le Guin","tags":["epistemology","future","philosophy"],"id":851,"author_id":"Ursula+K.+Le+Guin"},{"text":"You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.","author":"Ursula K. Le Guin","tags":["change"],"id":1010,"author_id":"Ursula+K.+Le+Guin"},{"text":"Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to 'get away to'?Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane stove, five aluminum folding chairs, and a transistor radio on the inside. They arrive totally encapsulated in a secondhand reality. And then they move on to Yellowstone, and it's just the same there, all trailers and transistors. They go from park to park, but they never really go anywhere; except when one of them who thinks that even the wildlife isn't real gets chewed up by a genuine, firsthand bear.The same sort of thing seems to be happening to Elfland, lately.","author":"Ursula K. Le Guin","tags":["elfland","encapulsation","fantasy","reality"],"id":1940,"author_id":"Ursula+K.+Le+Guin"},{"text":"He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work -- his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy -- and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.","author":"Ursula K. Le Guin","tags":["capitalism","inequity","iniquity","initiative","profit"],"id":2123,"author_id":"Ursula+K.+Le+Guin"},{"text":"You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth?","author":"Ursula K. Le Guin","tags":["lie","truth"],"id":5209,"author_id":"Ursula+K.+Le+Guin"},{"text":"In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.","author":"Ursula K. Le Guin","tags":["evil","good","war"],"id":7908,"author_id":"Ursula+K.+Le+Guin"},{"text":"Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!","author":"Ursula K. Le Guin","tags":["fantasy","magic","power"],"id":8246,"author_id":"Ursula+K.+Le+Guin"},{"text":"It's a queer business, making oneself blind.","author":"Ursula K. Le Guin","tags":["blindness","choice"],"id":9910,"author_id":"Ursula+K.+Le+Guin"},{"text":"You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.","author":"Ursula K. Le Guin","tags":["change","home"],"id":12175,"author_id":"Ursula+K.+Le+Guin"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":387,"pages":39,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}