Quotes from The Word for World is Forest

Ursula K. Le Guin ·  160 pages

Rating: (10.3K votes)


“A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Word for World is Forest


“For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Word for World is Forest


“Sometimes a god comes," Selver said. "He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Word for World is Forest


“I don’t know. Do men kill men, except in madness? Does any beast kill its own kind? Only the insects. These yumens kill us as lightly as we kill snakes. The one who taught me said that they kill one another, in quarrels, and also in groups, like ants fighting. I haven’t seen that. But I know they don’t spare one who asks life. They will strike a bowed neck, I have seen it! There is a wish to kill in them, and therefore I saw fit to put them to death.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Word for World is Forest


“Had his fear, in fact, been the personal fear that Selver might having learnt the racial hatred, reject him and treat him not as you but as one of them.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Word for World is Forest



“Can you walk the road your dream goes?
Sometimes. Sometimes I am afraid to.
Who is not.
...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Word for World is Forest


“The most winning characteristic of the rather harsh Cetian temperament was curiosity, inopportune, and inexhaustible curiosity; Cetians died eagerly, curious as to what came next.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Word for World is Forest


“You have not thought things through,” he said. By his standards it was a brutal insult.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Word for World is Forest


“For the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Word for World is Forest


“In diversity is life and where there's life there's hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest! one to be sure.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Word for World is Forest



“Dünya hep yenidir, kökleri ne kadar eski de olsa.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Word for World is Forest


“In diversity is life and where there's life there's hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Word for World is Forest


“The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he's just had a woman or just killed another man. That wasn't original, he'd read it in some old books; but it was true. That was why he liked to imagine scenes like that. Even if the creechies weren't actually men.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Word for World is Forest


About the author

Ursula K. Le Guin
Born place: in Berkeley, California, The United States
Born date October 21, 1929
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“War was to be entered upon with sadness, with regret, but also with ferocity.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness


“And I’m going to make you fall in love with me all over again. Every morning and every night. In every city and at the edge of every ocean. I’ll remind you why you’re mine and why I’ve always been yours.”
― Meredith Wild, quote from Hard Love


“Do you know which is the greatest epic till date?”
― Hari Kumar K, quote from When Strangers meet..


“We’ve been working on this for a week,” he continues, “and we’ve made no progress. Who do I have to kill to make things happen?”

If only the psycho were joking.”
― Laura Thalassa, quote from The Queen of Traitors


“We were having another look among the bushes for David's lost worsted ball, and instead of the ball we found a lovely nest made of the worsted, and containing four eggs, with scratches on them very like David's handwriting, so we think they must have been the mother's love-letters to the little ones inside.”
― J.M. Barrie, quote from Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens


Interesting books

Spring Snow
(8.6K)
Spring Snow
by Yukio Mishima
The Wednesday Wars
(30.6K)
The Wednesday Wars
by Gary D. Schmidt
Confessions of a Murder Suspect
(23.9K)
Confessions of a Mur...
by James Patterson
The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
(61.5K)
The Gifts of Imperfe...
by Brené Brown
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
(7.5K)
Refuge: An Unnatural...
by Terry Tempest Williams
Slawter
(11.3K)
Slawter
by Darren Shan

About BookQuoters

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.