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The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9) QUOTES

The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9) QUOTES

1 " People need God the way a three-year-old needs a chainsaw. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

2 " 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 , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

3 " In war everybody is a prisoner. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

4 " 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 , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

5 " In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

6 " 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 , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

7 " 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 , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

8 " 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 , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

9 " History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

10 " We shape each other to be human. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

11 " moieties "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

12 " 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 , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

13 " If you write science fiction you can spell things the way you like, sometimes. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

14 " 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 , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

15 " 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 , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

16 " 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 , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

17 " But a generation that knows only how to travel — can they teach a generation how to arrive? "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

18 " He mentally perceived words as having various sizes, densities, depths; words were dark stars, some small and dull and solid, some immense, complex, subtle, with a powerful gravity-field that attracted infinite meanings to them. Freedom was the biggest of the dark stars. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

19 " IF NOTHING IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOU, WHAT IS A LITTLE DIFFERENT FROM YOU IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOU "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)

20 " I learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)