“Not even need and love can defeat fate...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“Without war there are no heroes."
"What harm would that be?"
"Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write. I'm not sure of the nature of my existence, and wonder to find myself writing.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“Aeneas' mother is a star?"
"No; a goddess."
I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus."
He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. "So do we, he said. "But Venus also became more...With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite...There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light..."
It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn’t be given, wouldn’t be taken, but chose my man and my fate.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't "get into" me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.
The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names--Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the storm cloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren't people. They don't love and hate, they aren't for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“There's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“I think if you have lost a great happiness and try to recall it, you are only asking for sorrow, but if you do not try to dwell on the happiness, sometimes you find it dwelling in your heart and body, silent but sustaining.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“We are all contingent. Resentment is foolish and ungenerous, and even anger is inadequate. I am a fleck of light on the surface of the sea, a glint of light from the evening star. I live in awe. If I never lived at all, yet I am a silent wing on the wind, a bodiless voice in the forest of Albunea. I speak, but all I can say is: Go, go on.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“Perhaps women have more complicated selves. They know how to do more than one thing at one time. That comes late to men. If at all.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“I came to the center of the maze following him. Now I must find my way back out alone.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“Why must there be war?" "Oh Lavinia, what a woman's question that is! Because men are men.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“We’re a rough people, born of oak, as they say, here in the western land; tempers run high, weapons are always at hand.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“Sairin bana siirinde okudugu Troya'nin dususu hikayesinde kralin kizi Cassandra olacaklari onceden goruyor ve Troyalıların buyuk atı sehre sokmalarını onlemeye calisiyor, ama onu kimse dinlemiyordu: Uzerrindeki lanetti bu, hakikati gorecek, bunu soyleyecek, ama onu kimse duymayacaktı. Erkeklerden ziyade kadinlarin uzerindeki bir lannetir bu. Erkekler hakikatin kendilerine ait olmasini, kendi kesifleri, kendi mulkleri olmasini ister.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“The moths look like souls in the underworld,”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“There was room for them. A great deal of Italy, back then, was forest. Where man goes, trees die; or, to paraphrase Tacitus, we make a desert and call it progress.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“We who are called royal are those who speak for our people to the powers of the earth and sky, as those powers transmit their will through us to the people. We are go-betweens. The chief duty of a king is to perform the rites of praise and placation as they should be performed, to observe care and ceremony and so understand and make known the will of the powers that are greater than we are. It is the king who tells the farmer when to plow, when to plant, when to harvest, when the cattle should go up to the hills and when they should return to the valleys, as he learns these things from his experience and his service at the altars of earth and sky. In the same way it is the mother of the family who tells her household when to rise, what work to do, what food to prepare and cook, and when to sit to eat it, having learned these things from her experience and her service at the altars of her Lares and Penates. So peace is maintained and things go well, in the kingdom and in the house. Both Aeneas and I had grown up in this responsibility, and it was dear to us both.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“Oh Lavinia, Lavinia, you are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“Hector had no virtue?” “Of course he did. He won all his battles, till the last one.” “We all do,” Aeneas remarked.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“I think one cannot be left alive among so many deaths without feeling unendurable shame.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
“Justice, mercy, does Mars care for them?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Lavinia
Ursula K. Le Guin
Born place: in Berkeley, California, The United States
Born date October 21, 1929
See more on GoodReads
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
― Rebecca Solnit, quote from Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
“Someone does something lousy and selfish to you in a game, and the extent of insular and amygdaloid activation predicts how much outrage you feel and how much revenge you take.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, quote from Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“This entire time I've been closing myself off from love., but it's been the solution all along. I've built walls at every turn. No more.”
― Sara Ella, quote from Unblemished
“We are vastly more powerful than we think we are. With a little support from flowers, we can recognize how deeply we affect others with our own energy and presence. We can cultivate a sharper awareness of our impact in the world.”
― Katie Hess, quote from Flowerevolution: Blooming into Your Full Potential with the Magic of Flowers
“From what I've witness, honesty didn't really make anyone happy. The truth was a punch to the gut, and while you were falling, a knee to the face, then you could lie on the floor and bleed for a spell.”
― Tanya Thompson, quote from Assuming Names: A Con Artist's Masquerade
Oh, The Places You'l...
Fifty Shades of Grey
Bridge to Terabithia
Clockwork Princess
The Titan's Curse
The HobbitBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
