To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.


Ursula K. LeGuin

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You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words eve...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go t...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Ai taught me a Terran game played on squares with little stones, called go, an excellent difficult g...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Se...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they g...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and go...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
There are talking dogs all over the place, unbelievably boring they are, on and on and on about sex ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Oh, Hank," Susan whispered, "their wings are furry."

"Oh, James," Harriet whispered, "the...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful functio...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the
darkness, and they do not come back. The place they...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that w...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean w...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your min...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The little Otak was hiding in the rafters of the house, as it did when strangers entered. There it s...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what al...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at th...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what al...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgot...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helpl...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
My dogs have barked at a beggar tonight and he proves a prince of starlight.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
... “Dangerous!” Vea laughed radiantly. “What an utterly marvellous compliment! Why am I dange...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Eith...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law bu...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't the...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The prisoner is the jailer's jailer.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
What good is power when you're too wise to use it?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game...speak the truth and hear the truth.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the fore...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; the...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the ins...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicor...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
His words cost him so much, she thought, not like hers that just came dancing out of the air and wen...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
On the blank leaf glued to the inner back cover I drew the double curve within the circle, and black...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still th...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
There must be darkness to see the stars.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel......
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice
URSULA K. LE GUIN