Lory Widmer Hess

“That gap--that gap between what we want to do and what we do--you call it patience, I call it waiting for God. It's in that gap, that gulf, that creation occurs. But I haven't the strength to wait, I leap in and try to play God. And spoil everything.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“We have something to say, and we haven't said it yet. We stammer. We try to learn to speak, like infants. We don't know how. We say a little of what we have to say sometimes, in different languages, in a painting, in a prayer, in an act of knowledge. Every so often we learn a new bit of it, a new word. The newest word is the word Freedom. Maybe it's no more than a new way of saying one of the old words. I don't think so. It's new. Still we're a long way from being able to say the whole thing yet. But we must learn the new words, all of us, we must all be able to speak them. They're no good if you don't say them aloud ...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“You set out ... you set out to make yourself. To make the world. All the things you must do, and see, and learn, and be, you must go through it all. You leave home, come to the city, travel, miss nothing, experience it all; you make yourself, you fill the world with yourself and your purposes, your ambitions, your desires. Until there's no room left. No reason to turn around.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

“There is no safe house but death. Nothing of our own building will protect us, not the jails, nor the palaces, nor the comfortable houses. But the grandeur of knowing that, the pride and grandeur of being on one's own at last, alone, under the enormous and indifferent sky, unhoused and unprotected! To be nothing, a girl, confused, grieved, frightened, foolish, shivering in the January frost, all that, yes, but also to learn at last the stature of her spirit: to come into her inheritance.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena