Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes About Choices

Quotes about: Choices

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

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Responsibility, Choices, Anarchist

  URSULA K. LE GUIN (1975). “The Wind's Twelve Quarters”

• 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.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Light, Choices Made, May

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Tombs of Atuan: Book Two”, p.157, Simon and Schuster

• I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Loss, Thinking, Voice

• Even the best weapon is an unhappy tool, hateful to living things. So the follower of the Way stays away from it. Weapons are unhappy tools, not chosen by thoughtful people, to be used only when there is no choice, and with a calm, still mind, without enjoyment. To enjoy using weapons is to enjoy killing people, and to enjoy killing people is to lose your share in the common good. It is right that the murder of many people be mourned and lamented. It is right that a victor in war be received with funeral ceremonies.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  War, Thoughtful, People

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Jerome P. Seaton (2009). “Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way”, p.48, Shambhala Publications

• The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Women, Responsibility, Rights

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2017). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.98, Grove Press

• Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Responsibility, Law, Punishment

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2009). “The Dispossessed”, p.31, Harper Collins

• Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors besides battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fanstasy is good at thinking about those other ways.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Real, War, Thinking

• A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Choices Made, Survival, Favors

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.18, Grove Press

• My Real Children starts quietly, then suddenly takes you on two roller-coaster rides at once, swooping dizzily through a double panorama and ending in a sort of super Sophie's Choice. A daring tour de force.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Real, Two

• To have a choice at all is to be privileged.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Choices, Privileged

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Pain, Choices, Missing

• To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Rocks, Rivers, Choices

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.283, Simon and Schuster

• By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Law, Choices, Betrayed

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Telling”, p.139, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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