Certainly the effort to remain unchanged, young, when the body gives so impressive a signal of change as the menopause, is gallant; but it is a stupid, self-sacrificial gallantry, better befitting a boy of twenty than a woman of forty-five or fifty. Let the athletes die young and laurel-crowned. Let the soldiers earn the Purple Hearts. Let women die old, white-crowned, with human hearts.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

age effort menopause womanhood

About Ursula K. Le Guin

Portrait of Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin ( KROH-bər lə GWIN; née Kroeber; October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) was an American author. She is best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe and the fantasy series Earthsea. Her work was first published...

More quotations from Ursula K. Le Guin

There is a field where all wonderful perfections of microscope and telescope fail. All exquisite niceties of weights and measures as well as that which is behind them, the keen and driving power of the mind. No facts, however indubitably detected, no effort of reason, however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful.

—Ursula K. Le Guin in The Dispossessed

mind beauty perfection reason

If you see a whole thing — it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero — really look — and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message: "You must change your life.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

life religion change myth mystery art reason consciousness reflection inquiry

All civilization ever does is hide the blood and cover up hate with pretty words.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

love time change

More quotations tagged with “effort”

Do you ever feel like what's happening at this moment will never happen again? Like you could never repeat it, no matter how hard you tried?

—Jennifer E. Smith in Field Notes on Love

time perception effort moment

I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my very best each and every day.

—Abraham Lincoln

effort intention

I don't think you realize how hard it is to always be reaching out to you, and to continually be rebuffed.

—Sarah Dessen in What Happened to Goodbye

love effort distance exertion

You throw an anchor into the future you want to build, and you pull yourself along by the chain.

power vision effort control the future

Beautiful things grow out of shit. Nobody ever believes that. Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow appeared there and formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down and they would be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that's how things work. If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but and you're not one of them, you're just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life where you could say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I'm an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.

art creativity effort originality