Book//mark – The forest | Ursula K. Le Guin, 1964 – 75

Max Ernst, The Forest, 1935
“We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending.
Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.”
“It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest
stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a
fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Yes, that he will.
There’s the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.”
“This was a great magic. Festin had no more performed it than has any man who in exile
or danger longs for the earth and waters of his home, seeing and yearning over the doorsill
of his house, the table where he has eaten, the branches outside the window of the room where
he has slept. Only in dreams do any but the great Mages realize this magic of going home.”
“Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, short stories, 1964 – 75