Quotes from The Lathe of Heaven

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand
outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible...
It was more than diginity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved.
The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.

But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking....

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other's arms, holding love, asleep.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. —Chuang Tse: XXIII”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire willpower, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“It was more than dignity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved. The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“On top of pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“«I am tired,» he said. «I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire will power, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button.»

«You have lived well,» the Alien said.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“They made love. Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other's arms, holding love, asleep.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“I don’t like making the rest of the world live in my dreams, but I certainly don’t want to live in yours.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered all in one moment with its roots in his loins and its flowers in his mind.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“She could not have been born gray. Her
color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed
nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people's world. She had not been born.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“Praise God from whom all blessings flow, including good-natured men.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

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Popular quotes

“Non troppi anni fa c'era un modo prefabbricato di essere vecchi, proprio come c'era un modo prefabbricato di essere giovani. Non sono più in vigore, né l'uno né l'altro. Sul permissibile c'è stata una grande lotta; e un grande ribaltamento. Nondimeno, un uomo di settantanni dovrebbe ancora lasciarsi coinvolgere nell'aspetto carnale della commedia umana? Essere, senz'alcuna contrizione, un vecchio secolare ancora sensibile a ciò che di umanamente eccitante lo circonda? Non è la condizione che una volta era simboleggiata dalla pipa e dalla sedia a dondolo. Forse è ancora un po' un affronto, per la gente, rifiutarsi di ubbidire al vecchio orologio della vita. Capisco di non poter contare sul virtuoso rispetto degli altri adulti. Ma cosa posso farci se, per quello che mi riguarda, non ci si mette mai l'animo in pace, mai, per vecchio che uno sia?”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Dying Animal

“Wow,” Finn said, looking her up and down. “Wander into a bad part of town?”
Megan looked down at the scrape on her left knee and the nasty bruise forming on her shin.
“No. It was…practice,” Megan said. “I’m sorry, should I go?”
“No! No,” Finn said, pulling a stool out from the wall. “Come in. Take a load off. You look like you could use it.”
Megan smiled and inched into the shed, afraid to touch anything with any part of her body. She slipped sideways past his easel and sat down on the stool, which shifted under her weight. Megan threw her arms out for balance and Finn caught her hand.
“Sorry. It’s kind of old,” he said.
“No problem,” Megan replied. She looked at his hand clamped around hers. He released her, clearing his throat and slapping his palm against his jeans.”
― quote from Megan Meade's Guide to the McGowan Boys

“Any rats around?” asked Gregor. “Just the one on my back,” said Ares.”
― Suzanne Collins, quote from Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane

“the free soul is rare,but you know it when you see it- basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness

“A storm came chasing the sky away. And virgin sands
Drank all the water of the evening woods,
God's wind blew icicles into the ponds;
As I wept I saw gold,- and could not drink.

- Delirium II - Alchemy of the Word”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

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