Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred, since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other, you can no more separate them than you can separate the two sides of a coin.

It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow.

Everything contains its antithesis.

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

I think there's a yin and a yang to everything.

If you take the yin-yang, it has a piece of the other inside itself. You can't be too much of one thing and be balanced.

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.

What is and what is not create each other.

Everything has two sides - the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn.

God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.

Listen, the obvious thing to remember is without dark, there is no light, and without light, there is no dark.

Just as we have two eyes and two feet, duality is part of life.

The rose and the thorn, and sorrow and gladness are linked together.

Angels are not complete, they need their counterparts, the dark needs the bright, the hidden needs the open, and vice versa. Sometimes they meet and recognise each other. Sometimes, as with Horatio and me, the pairing occurs over spaces of time and distance.

Comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin. A talent in one area might also lead to a predisposition in the other.

People desire to separate their worlds into polarities of dark and light, ugly and beautiful, good and evil, right and wrong, inside and outside. Polarities serve us in our learning and growth, but as souls we are all.

Even a sheet of paper has two sides.

As you go back or move toward insights/ideas/events/words/lessons/mistakes in the past, you develop into the future from the present. I think that's pretty cool that two quote-unquote opposites are intrinsically linked. That whole theme of opposites being two sides of the same whole is a theme that's always been intriguing to me.

For everything that you find dreadful, there's usually something that is rather marvelous as well.

I'm all about polarities and juxtapositions.

I'm fascinated by the yin and yang of everything.

Nothing is the shadow of Everything.

Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil. Therefore having and not having arise together. Difficult and easy complement each other. Long and short contrast each other. High and low rest upon each other. Voice and sound harmonize each other. Front and back follow one another.

Good and evil go hand in hand, you can't seperate them.

Life without death and happiness without misery are contradiction and neither can be found alone, because each of them is a different manifestation of the same thing.