Ursula K. Le Guin · 160 pages
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“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
Ursula K. Le Guin
Born place: in Berkeley, California, The United States
Born date October 21, 1929
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“That night I slept badly, thrashing about in my bed, not quite asleep and not quite awake. At times I had the feeling there was someone else in my bedroom who was talking to me, but of course I could not deal with this perception in any realistic way, since I was half-asleep and half-awake, and thus, for all practical purposes, I was out of my mind.”
― Thomas Ligotti, quote from Teatro Grottesco
“When every link to the outside world is severed, time has no meaning. It ceases to exist other than as a dull memory, a vague recollection of what a minute used to be, an hour, a day. Sealed up tight so far beneath the ground, every single second was stretched out almost to infinity—each one a vast and empty abyss where time used to reign, an ageless aeon barren of significance and consequence.
When every scrap of light and sound has been taken away, reality has no meaning. It too ceases to exist, for what is reality other than the cumulation of senses—images witnessed by our own eyes and the noises that enter through our ears? But when all those senses are starved, then the real world fades away like the last frantic gasp of a television program when the set is switched off.
And when reality goes, sanity has no reason. How can your ability to behave in a normal and rational way still exist when nothing normal or rational remains? As soon as reality breaks, as soon as we are separated from the physical world, the cracks begin to appear in our minds. And through them seeps the madness that has always been there, flowing into your skull like a liquid nightmare.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“It's utterly beautiful not to know my own edges.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from Bevor ich sterbe
“the thought is only terrifying if she chooses to be terrified. The quality of her experience depends entirely on the thoughts she chooses. Reality depends on what is paid attention to.”
― Lisa Genova, quote from Inside the O'Briens
“I see your eyes—those beautiful but frustrating eyes—looking up at me and offering everything I f**king want. I’m going to take it.” He growled out in a voice I hardly recognized. “I’m going to take everything you’re offering and more. I see your body laid out before me. You are open, vulnerable, and so f**king sexy that I can’t help but want to own it.”
― Ella Frank, quote from Blind Obsession
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