Essayists From The United States

"If you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God."

"But the honest truth is that what drives me as an economist is that economics is fun. I think I understand why so many people think that economics is a boring subject, but they are wrong. On the contrary, there is hardly anything I know that is as exciting as finding that the great events that move history, the forces that determine the destiny of empires and the fate of kings, can sometimes be explained, predicted, or even controlled by a few symbols on a printed page. We all want power, we all want success, but the ultimate reward is the simple joy of understanding."

"I do not mean to say that formal economic analysis is worthless, and that anybody's opinion on economic matters is as good as anyone else's. On the contrary! I am a strong believer in the importance of models, which are to our minds what spear-throwers were to stone age arms: they greatly extend the power and range of our insight. In particular, I have no sympathy for those people who criticize the unrealistic simplifications of model-builders, and imagine that they achieve greater sophistication by avoiding stating their assumptions clearly. The point is to realize that economic models are metaphors, not truth. By all means express your thoughts in models, as pretty as possible (more on that below). But always remember that you may have gotten the metaphor wrong, and that someone else with a different metaphor may be seeing something that you are missing."

"Mede spoke with amused tolerance, as physicists generally speak of biologists."

"“Look at the top tier of writers in science fiction and fantasy today … and you see the unmistakable traces of Le Guin in their work,” author John Scalzi wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “Multiple generations of her spiritual children, making the genre more humane and expansive, and better than it would have been without her.”"

"I'm very ambivalent about Le Guin; obviously, she's a wonderfully inventive writer, but her lack of awareness about a lot of political and historical issues just exasperates me. If I read her fiction I usually have to forget a lot I know about people and the dynamics of behavior. And sometimes her moralizing about everything strikes me as not humanist at all. But I'm jealous of her, so all of this is suspect...She's a charming person, incredibly witty and very brilliant. But there are times I'd like to shake her down to her toes until the loose change comes out. I don't think she really knows how political, communal, people processes actually work. Delany, on the other hand, clearly does, and he's applied this awareness to his public criticisms of The Dispossessed...it's clear from what Le Guin writes that she isn't in touch with a lot of political realities, which causes her fiction to fall apart. It's obviously a conscientious thing on her part-no one can doubt her sincerity or genuine concern-but I wish she'd just let go of it and write selfishly about things she enjoys. Because when she does that, she's absolutely splendid. The darkness box, animal languages, and so on. Superb. She has such a remarkable feel for the little details-the stories, the buildings, the language, the histories, the clothing and food, the fiction, the proverbs, the whole self-reflection of cultures."

"Another characteristic of contemporary utopias is sexual permissiveness. The point of that permissiveness is not to break taboos but to separate sexuality from questions of ownership, reproduction and social structure. The feminist utopias that are not entirely lesbian often assume, as in Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, some mix of monogamy, casual promiscuity, homosexuality and heterosexuality, with adolescent bisexuality as the norm."

"there are two authors I consider my teachers, one on the most realistic side and the other one in the most fantastic side: ...Ursula K. Le Guin...and Nabokov"

"“We are terribly diminished by Ursula Le Guin’s absence,” said China Miéville, a science fiction and fantasy writer. “She was, rather, a colossus of literature, a radical, a trailblazer.”"

"There's a great quote actually that she gave the Paris Review a few years ago. I will let her speak here because she's the writer. She said, (reading) where I can get prickly and combative is if I'm just called a sci-fi writer. I'm not. I'm a novelist and poet. Don't shove me into your damn pigeon hole where I don't fit because I'm all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeon in all directions...She didn't pull any punches. She always kind of went her own way. You know, there were very few women writing sci-fi and fantasy in the '60s when she first began to publish. And it was definitely not as respected a genre as it is today. But she was so influential. Just as an example, when she began to publish the "Earthsea" books in the late-'60s, there were a lot of characters that weren't white, and that was a pretty big deal if the only other thing you were seeing was Lieutenant Uhura on "Star Trek."...She was a voracious reader. She was known to study Taoism. The ideas of balance from Taoism come through very strongly in her work, particularly in the "Earthsea" novels. There's this one bit where an aspiring mage who's at a magic school that is so not Hogwarts - he has to learn to do by not doing."

"Mary Robinette Kowal told NPR's Petra Mayer that Le Guin's work could not be confined to a simple label found atop bookstore shelves. "Throughout her life she embraced new forms of technology; she was constantly pushing boundaries and barriers. That is inspiring to me," Kowal said. "She was one of the first really big voices in science fiction and fantasy who was a woman," Kowal added. "And I think she did a lot for science fiction and fantasy — not just for women and women's roles because of her feminism but also legitimizing us as an art form. There are a lot of people who will read an Ursula Le Guin book and go, 'Well, this isn't science fiction, it's literature.' But of course, it is science fiction. A lot of times, she can be a gateway drug for people.""

"Not all art takes collapse for granted, however. There have long been creators on the margins, from Afrofuturists to feminist fantasists, who have attempted to explode the idea that the future"

"“She influenced a generation and more of writers – women by inspiration and example – but also any men with an ambition to work with science fiction and fantasy to aspire to more than the forms were allowed to do, or be,” said Guy Gavriel Kay. “We’re poorer for her loss, and richer for having had her presence.”"

"For Margaret Atwood, Le Guin is a "quintessentially American writer", of undoubted literary quality, "for whom the quest for the Peaceable Kingdom is ongoing". Her worlds, Le Guin says, are not so much invented as discovered. "I stare and see something, maybe a person in a landscape, and have to find out what it is." But whether charting inner lands or outer space, her eye remains on the here and now. At 76, Le Guin counts among her affiliations the peace and women's movements ("I take a perverse pleasure in calling myself a feminist"), and Taoism ("profoundly subversive")."

"Ursula can write a simple, simple sentence, and I will find myself in tears. She has always been thinking about issues of power and race and how they play out."

"I have no guilt regarding my love of fantasy and science fiction, only pleasure. I grew up reading the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I chuckle over how this “genre” has become mainstream and how time travel, alternative universes and magic are now so everyday. Plus, no one could ever feel guilty about reading writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick."

"Ursula Le Guin has died. She is a master storytelling. She is fierce and frighteningly smart and does not tolerate fools. Her EARTHSEA books are a revelation."

"Ursula Le Guin has been a hero of mine for 20 years. She's done so much, and she will continue to do good even though she's gone. I honestly don't know what I would have become if it weren't for Ursula Le Guin. The first time I read "A Wizard of Earthsea" I realized how balance could be even more epic than war. Suddenly, Fantasy wasn't just wish fulfillment and grandeur, it was real and complex."

"Her publisher at Gollancz, Malcolm Edwards, said that “those of us who had the pleasure of working with her will remember her as a gracious and good-humoured woman with an iron will, gently expressed”. “She was by common consent one of the greatest – if not the greatest – contemporary SF and fantasy author. This is a very sad day,” said Edwards."

"I grew up in a pacifist anarchist community that was Anishinaabe-founded, at least to some degree. So, when I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed, I could absolutely understand the whole process of community and of shunning or shaming a person as a form of power and control, but also the recognition of combining art with science, rather than understanding them as separate. Although her story is science fictional, by acknowledging the role of storytelling in this combination between art and science, Le Guin again takes the fiction out of science fiction, and works with other forms of science."

"Like one or two other SF figures of unassailable stature, Le Guin is deeply courteous. She seems to meet people in the expectation, or maybe simply the hope that she will learn from the encounter. She is like the novelist Doris Lessing; they do not reflect the world; they absorb it."

"I especially liked Ursula Le Guin's Dispossessed, and the original Dune by Frank Herbert was another favorite of mine."

"(If you had to pick a writer for a mentor, who would you choose and why? ) It’s a toss-up between Leslie Marmon Silko and Ursula Le Guin...LeGuin is a master storyteller, no matter what the subject...Very subtle, very wonderful, but LeGuin doesn’t let her writerly chops get in the way of entertaining her readers."

"Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free."

"They say Mars absolves the warrior from the crimes of war, but those who were not the warriors, those for whom the war was said to be fought, even though they never wanted it to be fought, who absolves them?"

"Why must there be war?" "Oh Lavinia, what a woman's question that is! Because men are men."

"Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?"

"I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them."

"There was a pretty prince of Troy named Paris. He and a Greek queen ran off together. Her husband called the other kings of Greece together, and they went to Troy, a great army in a thousand beaked ships, to get the woman back. Helen was her name." "What did they want her back for?" "Her husband's honor demanded it." "I should think his honor demanded that he divorce her and find himself a decent wife." "Lavinia, these people were Greeks."

"What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the greatest revolution of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens."

"I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying. It would be foolish to worry about anything while one died."

"It may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power."

"“Lines and colors made with earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All knowledge is local, all truth is partial,” Havzhiva said with an easy, colloquial dignity that he knew was an imitation of his mother, the Heir of the Sun, talking to foreign merchants. “No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.""

"What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History."

"The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense."

"He always asked, why thus? why this way, not another way? I answered: Because in what we do daily and in the way we do it, we enact the gods. He said: Then the gods are only what we do. I said: In what we do rightly, the gods are."

"To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock."

"What would that be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality."

"She too had lost her luck, and known death, and gone on."

"Nobody had made this wilderness, and there was no evil in it and no good; it simply was."

"And the rest, all the rest. All the days and lights and winds and years that would have been, and that would not be, that should be and were not, because he was dead. Shot dead on the road, in the wind, at twenty-one. His mountains unclimbed, never to be climbed."

"Armed men don’t sit down and talk."

"Going was easy. Keep on going was hard."

"If I don’t speak truth I can’t seek truth."

"In the self-important, Falco reflected, there is always room for a little more self-importance."

"Easy victories aren’t worth winning."

"They had learned how to listen for the sense of the meeting, not the voice of the loudest. They had learned that they must judge each time whether obedience was necessary and right, or misplaced and wrong. They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit’s strength lies in holding fast to the truth."

"When we’ve agreed that something ought to be done, or not done, we get very stubborn. And when that meets up with another stubbornness, it can make a kind of war, a struggle of ideas, the only kind of war anybody ever wins."

"Why should he remember her? Why should she remember him? She had other things to think about. She was a grown woman. She had to face life. Even if all life had to show her was a locked door, and behind the locked door, no room."

"“Why are you always so full of answers?” “Because life’s so full of questions.”"