Sunday, July 20, 2014

More Quotation Times!!! (Ursula Le Guin Edition)

Now, in quoting Ursula Le Guin (from a variety of essays compiled in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination), I'm running into a problem I didn't have with Margaret Atwood. Namely, that any attempt I make to quote Ursula Le Guin takes her words out of context, and they're inevitably better in context. But, I'm going to do it anyway, because much like a internet picture of the Mona Lisa isn't the Mona Lisa, but is respectable nonetheless, so it is with these quotes. So:

-"Maybe the people who rope themselves together and the huge heavy things resent such adaptable and uncertain footing because it makes them feel insecure. Maybe they fear they might be sucked in and swallowed. But I am not interested in sucking and am not hungry. I am just mud. I yield. I do try to oblige. And so when the people and the huge heavy things walk away they are not changed, except their feet are muddy, but I am changed. I am still here and still mud, but all full of footprints and deep, deep holes and tracks and traces and changes. I have been changed. You change me. Do not take me for granite."
-"I run into the moral problem we storytellers share with you anthropologists: the exploitation of real people. People should not use other people."
-"We [as children] had to be allowed to go into the Adult Side [of the library]. That was hard for the librarians. They felt they were hurling us little kids into a room full of sex, death, and weird grown-ups like Heathcliff and the Joads; and in fact, they were. We were intensely grateful."
-"Coming from another world, they take yours from you, changing it, draining it, shrinking it into a property, a commodity. And as your world is meaningless to them until they change it into theirs, so as you live among them and adopt their meanings, you are in danger of losing your own meaning to yourself."
-"My fantasies explore the use of power as art and its misuse as domination; they play back and forth along the mysterious frontier between what we think is real and what we think is imaginary, exploring the borderlands."
-"Fiction as we currently think of it, the novel and short story as they have existed since the eighteenth century, offers one of the very best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience."

No comments: