“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
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“Everybody was feeling happy now. The sun was shining brightly out of a soft blue sky and the day was calm. The giant peach, with the sunlight glinting on its side, was like a massive golden ball sailing upon a silver sea.”
― Roald Dahl, quote from James and the Giant Peach
“Look. Survey. Inspect. My hair is ruined! I look like a pan of bacon and eggs!”
― Diana Wynne Jones, quote from Howl's Moving Castle
“It was the first time that ever George had sat down on equal terms at any white man's table; and he sat down, at first, with some constraint, and awkwardness; but they all exhaled and went off like fog, in the genial morning rays of this simple overflowing kindness.
This indeed, was a home, - home, -a word that George had never yet known a meaning for; and a belief in God, and trust in His providence, began to encircle his heart, as, with a golden cloud of protection and confidence, dark, misanthropic, pining, atheistic doubts, and fierce despair, melted away before the light of a living Gospel, breathed in living faces, preached by a thousand unconscious acts of love and good-will, which, like the cup of cold water given in the name of a disciple, shall never lose their reward.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, quote from Uncle Tom's Cabin
“I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.”
― Ralph Ellison, quote from Invisible Man
“Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?”
― Walt Whitman, quote from Leaves of Grass
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