Em Lenartowicz > Em's Quotes

“Living life as an experiment is not merely a lifestyle choice. It is a metaphysical commitment to the primacy of difference over identity and of becoming over being. One’s life gains meaning in as far as it facilitates the possibility of evolution, of growth and the overcoming of limits. Life lived as an experiment becomes an expression of open-ended intelligence. Style and aesthetics do mightily matter but these are not prescribed; they need to be figured out in the course of one’s becoming. Life as an experiment is a thought experiment and an experiment in thinking. It is to think and let oneself be thought while not taking anything for granted; to be able to escape the banality of everything habitual in sense and thought. A real thought is real to the extent that it transforms the thinker.”
― Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, Open-Ended Intelligence

“Sleeping in the same bed and dreaming different dreams” is an old Chinese expression that describes the intimacy of partnership (whether in marriage or in business) without the communication necessary to sustain it.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“But while innocent and understandable, thinking you’re normal is one of the most damaging assumptions in negotiations.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Whether it’s in the office or around the family dinner table, don’t avoid honest, clear conflict. It will get you the best car price, the higher salary, and the largest donation. It will also save your marriage, your friendship, and your family. One can only be an exceptional negotiator, and a great person, by both listening and speaking clearly and empathetically; by treating counterparts—and oneself—with dignity and respect; and most of all by being honest about what one wants and what one can—and cannot—do. Every negotiation, every conversation, every moment of life, is a series of small conflicts that, managed well, can rise to creative beauty. Embrace them.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“I developed a workshop called “Steering the Craft,” focused on the glamorous aspects of writing, the really sexy stuff—punctuation, sentence length, grammar . .”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“Our schools now often teach little of an essential and once common knowledge, the vocabulary of grammar—the techspeak of language and writing. Words such as subject, predicate, object, or adjective and adverb, or past tense and past-perfect tense, are half understood by or wholly unfamiliar to many. Yet they’re the names of the writer’s tools. They’re the words you need when you want to say what’s wrong or right in a sentence. A writer who doesn’t know them is like a carpenter who doesn’t know a hammer from a screwdriver. (“Hey, Pat, if I use that whatsit there with the kinda pointy end, will it get this thing into this piece of wood?”)”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“I’m not going to discuss writing as self-expression, as therapy, or as a spiritual adventure. It can be these things, but first of all—and in the end, too—it is an art, a craft, a making. And that is the joy of it. To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It’s worth it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“Some of the techniques and values of expository writing are irrelevant and even problematic in narrative writing; training in the elaborately irresponsible language of bureaucracy or the artificially impersonal language of technology and science can tongue-tie a storyteller.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“One of the few things most writers agree on is that we can’t trust our judgment on our own freshly written work. To see its faults and virtues we need to look at it after a real interval: a day or two at least.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“The chief duty of a narrative sentence is to lead to the next sentence—to keep the story going.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“A story is made out of language, and language can and does express delight in itself just as music does. Poetry isn’t the only kind of writing that can sound gorgeous.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“Be very noisy, or be hushed. Try to reproduce the action in the jerky or flowing movement of the words. Make what happens happen in the sounds of the words, the rhythms of the sentences. Have fun, cut loose, play around, repeat, invent, feel free.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“It’s childish to assume people will understand unexpressed meanings. It’s dangerous to confuse self-expression with communication.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: a Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“A sentence has to hang together.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“And the rhythm of prose depends very much—very prosaically—on the length of the sentences. Teachers trying to get kids to write understandably, textbooks of style with their notion of “transparent” style, journalists with their weird rules and superstitions, and bang-pow thriller writers—they’ve all helped filled a lot of heads with the notion that the only good sentence is a short sentence. A convicted criminal might agree. I don’t.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“The thesaurus is invaluable when your mind goes blank on the word you need or when you really must vary the word choice—but use it discreetly. The Dictionary Word, the word that really isn’t your word, may stick out of your prose like a flamingo in a flock of pigeons, and it will change the tone.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“When the quality that the adverb indicates can be put in the verb itself (they ran quickly = they raced) or the quality the adjective indicates can be put in the noun itself (a growling voice = a growl), the prose will be cleaner, more intense, more vivid.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“Too many people who yatter on about “you should never use the passive voice” don’t even know what it is. Many have confused it with the verb to be, which grammarians so sweetly call “the copulative” and which doesn’t even have a passive voice. And so they go around telling us not to use the verb to be! Most verbs are more exact and colorful than that one, but you tell me how else Hamlet should have started his soliloquy, or how Jehovah should have created light.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“I feel like writing the last two paragraphs all over again, but that would be rude. Could I ask you to read them over again?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“I’m a little shy about telling anybody to go read Tolstoy’s War and Peace, since it’s quite an undertaking; but it is a wonderful book. And from the technical aspect, it’s almost miraculous in the way it shifts imperceptibly from the author’s voice to the point of view of a character, speaking with perfect simplicity in the inner voice of a man, a woman, even a hunting dog, and then back to the thoughts of the author . . . till by the end you feel you have lived many lives: which is perhaps the greatest gift a novel can give.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“All you need may be a character or two, or a conversation, or a situation, or a place, and you’ll find the story there. You think about it, you work it out at least partly before you start writing, so that you know in a general way where you’re going, but the rest works itself out in the telling. I like my image of “steering the craft,” but in fact the story boat is a magic one. It knows its course. The job of the person at the helm is to help it find its own way to wherever it’s going.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“As my knowledge of the real world is sketchy, I provide a fantasy subject. Don’t be afraid; it’s just an exercise. You can return to the real world immediately after and forever.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“The story is not in the plot but in the telling. It is the telling that moves.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“If it’s a complex subject, it probably can’t be expressed in any words at all except all the words of the story.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“Anton Chekhov gave some advice about revising a story: first, he said, throw out the first three pages.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“The discipline of art is freedom.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“the price of unquestioning acceptance is silence.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy

“I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy