Ursula K. Le Guin · 362 pages
Rating: (3.2K votes)
“I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“In war everybody is a prisoner.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting. ”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading." -- "On Despising Genres," essay”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“she had never known who she was at all, except sometimes for a moment in meditation, when her I am became It is, and she breathed the stars”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“Nothing in the world has tentacles or fins or paws or claws. Nothing in the world soars. Nothing swims. Nothing purrs, barks, growls, roars, chitters, trills, or cries repeatedly two notes, a descending fourth, for three months of the year. There are no months of the year. There is no moon. There is no year.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“My advice to young writers is, if you can’t marry money, at least don’t marry envy.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“Le Guin’s Rule: One person cannot do two fulltime jobs, but two persons can do three fulltime jobs — if they honestly share the work.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“What is it like to return from the dead? Not easy. Not for the one who returns, nor for his people. The place he occupied in their world has closed up, ceased to be, filled with accumulated change, habit, the doings and needs of others. He has been replaced. To return from the dead is to be a ghost: a person for whom there is no room.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“If you write science fiction you can spell things the way you like, sometimes.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“The conduct of a new sedoretu is to some extent, and wisely, prescribed by custom and sanctioned by religion. The first night after the ceremony of marriage belongs to the Morning and Evening couples; the second night to the Day and Night couples. Thereafter the four spouses may join as and when they please, but always and only by invitation given and accepted, and the arrangements are to be known to all four. Four souls and bodies and all the years of their four lives to come are in the balance in each of those decisions and invitations; passion, negative and positive, must find its channels, and trust must be established, lest the whole structure fail to found itself solidly, or destroy itself in selfishness and jealousy and grief.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“We shape each other to be human.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“But I don’t know what my side is, he thought, as he went back to his chair by the window. The Liberation, of course, yes, but what is the Liberation? Not an ideal, the freedom of the enslaved. Not now. Never again. Since the Uprising, the Liberation is an army, a political body, a great number of people and leaders and would-be leaders, ambitions and greed clogging hopes and strength, a clumsy amateur semi-government lurching from violence to compromise, ever more complicated, never again to know the beautiful simplicity of the ideal, the pure idea of liberty. And”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
Ursula K. Le Guin
Born place: in Berkeley, California, The United States
Born date October 21, 1929
See more on GoodReads
“There goes the most remarkable man I ever met. Unless I am badly mistaken, the world is due to hear from him one of these days.”
― Edmund Morris, quote from The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
“I shoved three CDs up my ass and got them out of Tower Records. It hurt like hell but I did it. New Michael Bolton, new Sting, and the best of Sammy Hagar. Totally painful. Definitely worth it.”
― Henry Rollins, quote from Eye Scream
“Leo hurried up to bed and hid under the covers. Under the covers he thought his life through. Although he soon fell asleep he could not sleep her out of his mind. He woke, beating his breast. Though he prayed to be rid of her, his prayers went unanswered. Through days of torment he endlessly struggled not to love her; fearing success, he escaped it. He then concluded to convert her to goodness, himself to God. The idea alternately nauseated and exalted him.”
― Bernard Malamud, quote from The Magic Barrel
“Right. Mutation is the trigger that moves evolution forward. So, how do mutations happen?”
― Kōji Suzuki, quote from Spiral
“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
Our Lady of the Lost...
Three Soldiers
Confessions of a Tri...
Maldoror and the Com...
Fireflies in Decembe...BookQuoters 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.
