Ursula K. Le Guin

Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask.""But you're the Answerers!""You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?""No__""To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.

To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.

...you play the instrument you have.

They praised his modesty and did not listen to him, for listening is a rare gift, and men will have their heroes.

Aeneas' mother is a star?""No; a goddess."I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus."He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. "So do we, he said. "But Venus also became more...With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite...There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light..."It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy.

As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.

Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.

I was alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark palace, in a strange snow-changed city, in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world.

Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.

The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I supposed?

I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?

What is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry?

Page 15, paperback version by Virago Press 1997: ... Let me ask you this, Mr Ai: do you know, by your own experience, what patriotism is?_ __o_, I said, shaken by the force of the intese personality suddenly turning itself wholly upon me. __ don´t think I do. If by patriotism you don´t mean the love of one`s homeland, for that I do know._ __o, I don__ mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year. We__e followed our road too far. And you, who hardly know what I__ talking about, who show us the new road __ He broke off. After a while he went on, in control again, cool and polite: __t__ because of fear that I refuse to urge your cause with the king, now. But not fear for myself, Mr. Ai. I__ not acting patriotically. There are, after all, other nations on Gethen.

And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises, and how a real love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?

How does one hate a country, or love one?... I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is the love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing.