Ursula K. Le Guin

The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.

It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.

Obsessed with tricking the girl, he had fallen into the trap he laid for her. Bitterly he recognised that he was always believing his own lies, caught in nets he had elaborately woven.

There is nothing important except people. A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.

O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn’t then.

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.

“It always seemed to me they’re sort of alike,” he said, “magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.”

Before the gods and after, always, are the streams. Caves, stones, hills. Trees. The earth. The darkness of the earth.

There’s people all over these parts, and maybe beyond, who think, as you said, that nobody can be wise alone. So these people try to hold to each other.

Highdrake said that to make love is to unmake power.

You’ll know what to say when the time comes. That’s the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it. And the rest is silence.

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.