Ursula K. Le Guin Book Recommendation and Quote

Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin’s birthday was on October 21st. She’s eighty-five years old. She writes mainly in the fantasy and science fiction genres. Her book titled The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination has her 1992 essay “Dogs, Cats, and Dancers: Thoughts about Beauty” in it. Since I like all three, dogs, cats, and dancers, it’s a hook for me.

She said, “A child’s body is very easy to live in. An adult body isn’t. The change is hard. And it’s such a tremendous change that it’s no wonder a lot of adolescents don’t know who they are. They look in the mirror — that is me? Who’s me? And then it happens again, when you’re sixty or seventy.”

I like this quote by Le Guin: “My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.”

Do you have a favorite Le Guin book or quote?

7 Comments

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7 Responses to Ursula K. Le Guin Book Recommendation and Quote

  1. Beautiful!! I want to find that book, The Wave of the Mind. Might find a nice fit in the Croneicles, eh? Thanks, babe.

  2. Elaine Schmitz

    I haven’t read any of her books, though she is on my list. I do remember an endorsement from the man is the Jane Austin Book Club movie who recommended her books to his love interest.

    • Interesting. I’ll have to see that movie.

      • It’s a great movie, especially if you like Jane Austen – one of my all time favorite authors. My favorite book of hers is Emma. “Jane Austen said of this book: Before she began the novel, Austen wrote, ‘I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.’ In the very first sentence she introduces the title character as ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich.’ Emma, however, is also rather spoiled, headstrong, and self-satisfied; she greatly overestimates her own matchmaking abilities; she is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people’s lives; and her imagination and perceptions often lead her astray.”(from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_(novel) ) Since I’m in the process of revising a novel I wrote, which has it’s own hard to like protagonist, I get what Jane was after.

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