"As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope"
About this Quote
Le Guin slips a hand grenade into a sentence that sounds like a bedtime story. By pairing “great scientists” with “all children,” she collapses the usual hierarchy of who gets to claim truth. Expertise matters, she grants, but so does that pre-theoretical way kids move through the world: by pretending, projecting, trying on other minds. The line flatters science just enough to get past the gatekeepers, then pivots to a more radical claim: imagination is not the enemy of perception but its engine.
The phrasing “above all” is doing quiet, insistent work. In a culture that treats imagination as decoration - art class, leisure, escapism - Le Guin reassigns it to the core cognitive tasks we boast about: seeing clearly (“perception”), feeling ethically (“compassion”), and staying oriented toward a future (“hope”). She’s also smuggling in a political argument. If perception depends on imagination, then what we call “realism” is never neutral; it’s a practiced set of images about whose lives are legible and whose suffering counts.
Context matters: Le Guin spent her career defending speculative fiction as a serious tool for thought, not a genre guilty pleasure. This sentence is a manifesto in miniature for the social function of storytelling. Stories aren’t lying; they’re rehearsal rooms for reality. They let us test alternate worlds, inhabit strangers, and picture outcomes beyond the cramped limits of the present. The subtext is a warning, too: starve imagination and you don’t just lose art - you lose the capacity to notice, to care, to envision anything better.
The phrasing “above all” is doing quiet, insistent work. In a culture that treats imagination as decoration - art class, leisure, escapism - Le Guin reassigns it to the core cognitive tasks we boast about: seeing clearly (“perception”), feeling ethically (“compassion”), and staying oriented toward a future (“hope”). She’s also smuggling in a political argument. If perception depends on imagination, then what we call “realism” is never neutral; it’s a practiced set of images about whose lives are legible and whose suffering counts.
Context matters: Le Guin spent her career defending speculative fiction as a serious tool for thought, not a genre guilty pleasure. This sentence is a manifesto in miniature for the social function of storytelling. Stories aren’t lying; they’re rehearsal rooms for reality. They let us test alternate worlds, inhabit strangers, and picture outcomes beyond the cramped limits of the present. The subtext is a warning, too: starve imagination and you don’t just lose art - you lose the capacity to notice, to care, to envision anything better.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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