Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

Everything, alas, is an abyss, — actions, desires, dreams, words!

I myself am an absolute abyss.

Everything depends on this: a fathomless sinking into a fathomless nothingness.

I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.

There was, like, this black hole where the world used to be, and we were both falling toward it. What could we hold on to?

I am here, alone, at the end of the world. I reach out and touch nothing.”.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.

We live in a vacuous world, yet we do so with a feeling of urgency.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.

To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.

...you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on

Why don’t you try wandering with me to the Palace of Not-Even-Anything

I wrote silences; nights; I recorded the unnameable.

There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.

Man is an abyss, and I turn giddy when I look down into it.

There's nothing at the center of what we do...No center. It doesn't exist. All of us-look at our lives: We have an acceptable level of affluence. We have entertainment. We have a relative freedom from fear. But there's nothing else.

I like to describe my life as a black hole with a little light out there.

And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you"— here I opened wide the door; — Darkness there, and nothing more.

I have been loved, Edward told the stars. So? said the stars. What difference does that make when you are all alone now?

I cling to nowhere until I fall - the crash of Nothing.

It cannot be seen, cannot be felt, Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt, It lies behind stars and under hills, And empty holes it fills, It comes first and follows after, Ends life, kills laughter.