The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination QUOTES

1 " Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

2 " The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

3 " To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

4 " The premise is: everybody's like me and we all think alike.
The corollary is: people who don't think like me don't matter. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

5 " People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

6 " A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

7 " There’s another option. You can consider the reader, not as a helpless victim or a passive consumer, but as an active, intelligent, worthy collaborator. A colluder, a coillusionist. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

8 " My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

9 " There is solid evidence for the fact that when women speak more than 30 percent of the time, men perceive them as dominating the conversation; well, similarly, if, say, two women in a row get one of the big annual literary awards, masculine voices start talking about feminist cabals, political correctness, and the decline of fairness in judging. The 30 percent rule is really powerful. If more than one woman out of four or five won the Pulitzer, the PEN/Faulkner, the Booker—if more than one woman in ten were to win the Nobel literature prize—the ensuing masculine furore would devalue and might destroy the prize. Apparently, literary guys can only compete with each other. Put on a genuinely equal competitive footing with women, they get hysterical. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

10 " We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

11 " Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

12 " I hope you’ll understand that I am not quoting those great words lightly. I do mean it. Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

13 " The beauty ideal is always a youthful one. This is partly simple realism. The young are beautiful. The whole lot of ’em. The older I get, the more clearly I see that and enjoy it. But it gets harder and harder to enjoy facing the mirror. Who is that old lady? Where is her waist? I got resigned, sort of, to losing my dark hair and getting all this limp grey stuff instead, but now am I going to lose even that and end up all pink scalp? I mean, enough already. Is that another mole or am I turning into an Appaloosa? How large can a knuckle get before it becomes a kneejoint? I don’t want to see, I don’t want to know. And yet I look at men and women my age and older, and their scalps and knuckles and spots and bulges, though various and interesting, don’t affect what I think of them. Some of these people I consider to be very beautiful, and others I don’t. For old people, beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

14 " All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

15 " Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it - because they're afraid of it. They're afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they'll have to redefine what literature is. And they're too damned lazy to do it. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

16 " We demand a rebellious spirit of those who have no chance to learn that rebellion is possible, but we the privileged hold still and see no evil. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

17 " Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

18 " Most best-sellers are written for readers who are willing to be passive consumers. The blurbs on their covers often highlight the coercive, aggressive power of the text—compulsive page-turner, gut-wrenching, jolting, mind-searing, heart-stopping—what is this, electroshock torture? "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

19 " The interplay of the aesthetic with the erotic is complex. The peacock's tail is beautiful to us, sexy to the peahen. Beauty and sexual attractiveness overlap, coincide. They may be deeply related. I think they should not be confused. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

20 " We weren’t cruel, we were ignorant, foolish. Children are ignorant and foolish. But they learn. If they are given a chance to learn. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination