Contact
Privacy
Book: The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
Quotes of Book: The Language of the Night:
TOP TAGS :attachmentsocial-changebuildingsstillbirthhighwayhumannessknownbooks

  1. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Language of the Night:

    No ideologues, not even religious ones, are going to be happy with Tolkien, unless they manage it by misreading him. For like all great artists he escapes ideology by being too quick for its nets, too complex for its grand simplicities, too fantastic for its rationality, too real for generalizations.
    book-quote

  2. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Language of the Night:

    For those who seek allegory, it must be maddening. {It must be allegory! Of course Frodo is Christ! - or is Gollum Christ?} for those whose grasp on reality is so tenuous that they crave ever-increasing doses of "realism" in their reading, it offers nothing - unless, perhaps, a shortcut to the looney bin.
    book-quote

  3. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Language of the Night:

    {T}he status of women in a society is a pretty reliable index of the degree of civilization of that society.
    book-quote

  4. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Language of the Night:

    It is our Puritanism, insisting that discipline means repression or punishment, which confuses the subject. To discipline something, in the proper sense of the word, does not mean to repress it, but to train it - to encourage it to grow, and act, and be fruitful, whether it is a peach tree or a human mind.
    book-quote

  5. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Language of the Night:

    I write science fiction because that is what publishers call my books. Left to myself, I should call them novels.
    book-quote

  6. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Language of the Night:

    When asked to "define the difference between fantasy and science fiction," I mouth and mumble and always end up talking about the spectrum, that very useful spectrum, along which one thing shades into another. Definitions are for grammar, not literature, I say, and boxes are for bones. But of course fantasy and science fiction different, just as red and blue are different; they have different frequencies; if you mix them {on paper-I work on paper} you get purple, something else again.
    book-quote

  7. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Language of the Night:

    For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it's true. Children know that. Adults know it too and that's precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.
    book-quoteursula-k-le-guinle-guin

  8. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Language of the Night:

    The art of one's own time tends to be formidable . . . because we have to learn how and where to take hold of it, what response is being asked of us, before we can get involved. It's truly new, and therefore truly a bit frightening.
    book-quote

  9. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Language of the Night:

    We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel – or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel – is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become… A person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. For the story – from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace – is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
    book-quote

  10. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Language of the Night:

    At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence."
    book-quote

  11. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Language of the Night:

    In many college English courses the words "myth" and "symbol" are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain't no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that's how Melville did it.
    book-quote

  12. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Language of the Night:

    Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction - you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.
    book-quotelifedirectionroads
Categories