Ursula K. Le Guin

Hope is a slighter, tougher thing even than trust, he thought, pacing his room as the soundless, vague lightning flashed overhead. In a good season one trusts life; in a bad season one only hopes, But they are of the same essence: they are the mind's indispensable relationship with other minds, with the world, and with time. Without trust, a man lives, but not a human life; without hope, he dies. When there is no relationship, where hands do not touch, emotion atrophies in void and intelligence goes sterile and obsessed. Between men the only link left is that of owner to slave, or murderer to victim.

To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.

Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience

One of the rocks in my soulbag, a little grey rock that I had picked up on a certain day in a certain place in the hills above the river in the Silver Time, a little piece of my world, that became my world. Every night I took it out and held it in my hand while I lay in bed waiting to sleep, thinking of the sunlight on the hills above the river, listening to the soft shushing of the ship__ systems, like a mechanical sea.

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.

There was something lacking _ in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not strong enough to take what was so generously offered. He felt himself dry and arid, like a desert plant, in this beautiful oasis. Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off his soul; the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could not drink.

I never thought before,_ said Tirin unruffled, __f the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, __ook, there__ the Moon._ Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth._ __here, then, is Truth?_ declaimed Bedap, and yawned. __n the hill one happens to be sitting on,_ said Tirin.

It takes a while to spoil a world, but it can be done.

As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear's shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea.

If nobody teaches us the words, the thoughts, we stay ignorant. If nobody shows a little child, two, three years old, how to look for the way, the signs of the path, the landmarks, then it gets lost in the mountain, doesn't it? And dies in the night, in the cold.

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.

The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.

With eye and hand and breath and will.

I have this, this gift, I know that; and I know my obligation to it.

Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it.

The nod of a head is such a small thing, it can mean so little, yet it is the gesture of assent that allows, that makes to be. The nod is the gesture of power, the yes. The numen. the presence of the sacred, is called by its name.

Tenar, I go where I am sent. I follow my calling. It has not yet let me stay in any land for long. Do you see that? I do what I must do. Where I go, I must go alone. So long as you need me, I__l be with you in Havnor. And if you ever need me again, call me. I will come. I would come from my grave if you called me, Tenar! But I cannot stay with you.

Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book AwardsHard times are coming, when we__l be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We__l need writers who can remember freedom _ poets, visionaries _ realists of a larger reality.Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this _ letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.Books aren__ just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable _ but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.I__e had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don__ want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn__ profit. Its name is freedom.