Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin

So seen, stupidity could be defined as a failure to make enough connections, and insanity as severe repeated error in making connections – in telling The Story of My Life.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

they had. The instructor directs their practice. Practice is an interesting word. We think of practicing as beginner’s stuff, playing scales, basic exercises. But the practice of an art is the doing of that art – it is the art.

The distinction is interesting. Reading is a silent collaboration of reader and writer, apart; lecturing, a noisy collaboration of lecturer and audience, together.

I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers – the

It is conversation, a word the root of which means “turning together.”

The desire for power, in the sense of power over others, is what pulls most people off the path of the pursuit of liberty. The reason Brontë does not mention it is probably that it was never even a temptation to her, as it was to her sister Charlotte. Emily did not give a damn about other people’s morals. But many artists, particularly artists of t

Her work, I really think her work isn’t fighting, isn’t winning, isn’t being the Earth, isn’t being the Moon. Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.

That phrase describes serious fantasy only in the sense of Solzhenitsyn’s saying: “The line between good and evil runs straight through every human heart.”