no seeing everything at once

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest. Found via even*cleveland

several planes

"To talk to Le Guin is to encounter alternatives. At her house, the writer is present, but so is Le Guin the mother of three, the faculty wife: the woman writing fantasy in tandem with her daily life. I asked her recently about a particularly violent story that she wrote in her early thirties, in two days, while organizing a fifth-birthday party for her elder daughter. “It’s funny how you can live on several planes, isn’t it?” she said."

- Julie Phillips' profile of Ursula K. Le Guin:

stories

"There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories" 

-- Ursula K. Le Guin

“It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin

Recommended Read

“There are a whole lot of ways to be perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment.”

I've been dipping in and out of this and I highly recommend having a copy on your book shelf. Brain pickings have a brilliant review, much more eloquent then I can manage, and here is my favorite bit from the essay “Dogs, Cats, and Dancers: Thoughts about Beauty”.

"Dogs don’t know what they look like. Dogs don’t even know what size they are. No doubt it’s our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. My brother’s dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart. When a little dog is assaulting its ankles the big dog often stands there looking confused — “Should I eat it? Will it eat me? I am bigger than it, aren’t I?” But then the Great Dane will come and try to sit in your lap and mash you flat, under the impression that it is a Peke-a-poo.

Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship.

Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat meets a threatening dog and can’t make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it’ll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again — “I thought that was a cat. Aren’t I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?

A lot of us humans are like dogs: we really don’t know what size we are, how we’re shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the people who have the most accurate, vivid sense of their own appearance may be dancers. What dancers look like is, after all, what they do."

"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 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, The Lathe of Heaven