Ursula K. Le Guin

Space Crone

Jiji

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

If I'm no good at pretending to be a man and no good at being young, I might just as well start pretending that I am an old woman. I am not sure that anybody has invented old women yet; but it might be worth trying.

from “Foreword to Murray Bookchin’s ‘The Next Revolution’ (2015)”

What all political and social thinking has finally been forced to face is, of course, the irreversible degradation of the environment by unrestrained industrial capitalism: the enormous fact of which science has been trying for fifty years to convince us, while technology provided us ever greater distractions from it. Every benefit industrialism and capitalism have brought us, every wonderful advance in knowledge and health and communication and comfort, casts the same fatal shadow. All we have, we have taken from the earth; and, taking with ever-increasing speed and greed, we now return little but what is sterile or poisoned. Yet we can't stop the process. A capitalist economy, by definition, lives by growth; as he observes: ‘For capitalism to desist from its mindless expansion would be for it to commit social suicide.’ We have, essentially, chosen cancer as the model of our social system.

Curry: A cat is a good companion for a writer, seemns like. 

Le Guin: A lot of writers seem to find it so, yeah. They are quiet. They do, of course, lie on your - well, he's not allowed to lie on my keyboard, but if you put a piece of paper down, the cat lies on it. They're paperweights - kind of nice, friendly, warm, furry paperweights.

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