Always Coming Home
Ursula K. Le Guin
Top 10 Best Quotes
“When I take you to the Valley, you’ll see the blue hills on the left and the blue hills on the right, the rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow late in the rainy season, and maybe you’ll say, “There it is, that’s it!” But I’ll say. “A little farther.” We’ll go on, I hope, and you’ll see the roofs of the little towns and the hillsides yellow with wild oats, a buzzard soaring and a woman singing by the shadows of a creek in the dry season, and maybe you’ll say, “Let’s stop here, this is it!” But I’ll say, “A little farther yet.” We’ll go on, and you’ll hear the quail calling on the mountain by the springs of the river, and looking back you’ll see the river running downward through the wild hills behind, below, and you’ll say, “Isn’t that the Valley?” And all I will be able to say is “Drink this water of the spring, rest here awhile, we have a long way yet to go and I can’t go without you.”
“When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast.... The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.”
“Owning is owing, having is hoarding.”
“...There's no right answer to the wrong question. Now what do we do?”
“Our souls are old, often used before. The knife outlasts the hand that holds it.”
“What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we have is here, now.”
“Bucket I feel so dreamy dreamy lazy, crazy sleepy like I want to be there in the doorway, the doorway or the porch corner be sitting, be empty notdoing not going an old bucket left there in the porch corner is like I am an old empty bucket somebody left there.”
“With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents to drink and be clean and irrigate with, using water mindfully, carefully. They lived in a land that answers greed with drought and death. A difficult land: aloof yet sensitive.”
“This thing is nothing to do with us. This thing is wilderness. The civilised human mind's relationship to it is imprecise, fortuitous and full of risk. There are no shortcuts. All the analogies run in one direction, our direction...The mind can imagine that shadow of a few leaves falling in the wilderness; the mind is a wonderful thing. But what about all the shadows of all the other leaves on all the other branches on all the other scrub oaks on all the other rides of all the wilderness? Could you imagine those for even a moment? What good would it do? Infinite good.”
“Need every word be translated? Sometimes the untranslated word might serve to remind us that language is not meaning, that intelligibility is an element of it only, a function. The untranslated word or name is not functional. It sits there. Written, it is a row of letters, which spoken with a more or less wild guess at the pronunciation produces a complex of phonemes, a more or less musical and interesting sound, a noise, a thing. The untranslated word is like a rock, a piece of wood. Its use, its meaning, is not rational, definite, and limited, but concrete, potential, and infinite. To start with, all the words we say are untranslated words.”
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Book Keywords:
sleepy, souls, what-to-do, inspirational, environment, right-and-wrong, anwers, future, water, next-life, in-the-moment, poem, property, ursula-k-le-guin, greed, environmental-conservation, question, empty
