Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes About Reality

Quotes about: Reality

• I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Real, Thinking, Hard Times

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2018). “Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.441, Hachette UK

• If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself - as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation - you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Spiritual, Respect, Hate

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.99, Ultramarine Publishing

• Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Thinking, Reality, Insanity

• I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Hard Times, Reality, Thinking

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2018). “Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.441, Hachette UK

• To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Positive, Real, Past

• George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Reality, Impossible, Defective

• Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Success, Dream, Reality

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

• At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Mean, Reality, Understanding

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.58, Ultramarine Publishing

• No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Pain, Reality, Roots

• It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Pain, Believe, Reality

• What is life without incompatible realities?

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Reality, What Is Life

• Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Mean, Reality, People

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2008). “The Lathe Of Heaven: A Novel”, p.59, Simon and Schuster

• 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

• What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make; I can only undo, unmake.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Character, Reality, Two

• Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Reality, Talking, Fantasy

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