Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes About Lying

Quotes about: Lying

• Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Truth, Lying, Writing

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.8, Penguin

• Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing -- instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Country, Lying, Eye

  A Left-Handed Commencement Address, delivered 22 May 1983, Mills College, Oakland, California

• I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Art, Lying, Thinking

• Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Light, Hands

  Ursula K. LeGuin (2017). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.193, Hachette UK

• Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Confusion, Needs

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1998). “Steering the craft: exercises and discussions on story writing for the lone navigator or the mutinous crew”, The Eighth Mountain Press

• Almost everything is double like that for adolescents; their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall; they see through everything, and are blind.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Fall, Heart

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Todd Barton, Margaret Chodos-Irvine, George Hersh (1985). “Always Coming Home”, p.184, Univ of California Press

• Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Gaps, Twisted

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume--Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions”, p.283, Macmillan

• We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God's truth, the universe at once began to exist.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Order, Littles

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume--Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions”, p.386, Macmillan

• Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this: Every group we belong to - by gender, sex, race, religion, age - is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Sex, Lying, Writing

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, p.197, Shambhala Publications

• ... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Believe, Defense

• Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Belief

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2009). “Powers”, p.294, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Novelists, Prophet

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.8, Penguin

• Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.... Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.... Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Dream, Lying, Sleep

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.8, Penguin

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

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Men, News

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Other Wind”, p.68, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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