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As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If the rowan's roots are shallow, it bears no crown. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
All her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If nobody teaches us the words, the thoughts, we stay ignorant. If nobody shows a little child, two, three years old, how to look for the way, the signs of the path, the landmarks, then it gets lost in the mountain, doesn't it? And dies in the night, in the cold. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There were actually very few men who could face reality when the going got tough. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You have not thought things through, he said. By his standards it was a brutal insult. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It was an ugly face, pale, coarse, and cruel, but Ged feared no man, though he might fear where such a man would guide him. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
No, I don't understand him, but he is worth listening to. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Lovecraft dangles like a rabbit from the jaws of his unconscious. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I tried to speak insipidly, yet everything I said seemed to take on a double meaning. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Fish and visitors stink after three days. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Though Argaven might be neither sane nor shrewd, he had had long practice in the evasions and challenges and rhetorical subtleties used in conversation by those whose main aim in life was the achievement and maintenance of the shifgrethor relationship on a high level. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Fiction - and poetry and drama - cleanse the doors of perception. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others ... Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You can't change anything from the outside in. Standing apart, looking down, talking the overview, you see pattern. What's wrong, what's missing. You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire willpower, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Truth is a matter of the imagination. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
foundations, laid in the dark but well laid. On these, methodically and carefully but with a deftness and certainty that seemed nothing of his own but a knowledge working through him, using him as its vehicle, he built up the beautiful steadfast structure of the Principles of Simultaneity. Takver, -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I never know the heron as it flies at first. What is the slow, wide-winged figure in the sky? Then I see it, like a word in a foreign language, like seeing one's own name written in a strange alphabet and recognizing it, I say it: the heron. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I'm sorry. When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, "Am I popular?" I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading."
"On Despising Genres," essay -- Ursula K. Le Guin
By and large books are mankind's best invention. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We read books to find out who we are. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Ward: Which would you rather have, a National Book Award or a Hugo?
Le Guin: Oh, a Nobel, of course.
Ward: They don't give Nobel Awards in fantasy.
Le Guin: Maybe I can do something for peace. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
All of us that read a lot, we're partly book-manufactured. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
While we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices ... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
a book is a box of words until you open it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The novelist's business is lying. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The only emotion I felt was shame. For him, for myself. Again I had trusted, and again I had betrayed and been betrayed. Venne -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Ronde, one a live village and the other deserted, as dead as Karnak, -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There are talking dogs all over the place, unbelievably boring they are, on and on and on about sex and shit and smells, and smells and shit and sex, and do you love me, do you love me, do you love me. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Crafty writers ... don't allow Exposition to form Lumps. They break up the information, grind it fine, and make it into bricks to build the story with. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Neither anger nor hope served any purpose. Nor grief. It was not the time for grief yet. Rekam was here with them, and they would delight in him as long as he was here. As long as his life. He is my great gift. You do hold my joy. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
So many of his problems were of a kind that other people did not understand, that he got used to working them out for himself, in silence. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?'
... 'Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
My enemies must nominate themselves; I have no interest at all in making, finding, or knowing them. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
In the latter months of his own long sickness the Master Herbal had taught him much of the healer's lore, and the first lesson and the last of all that lore was this: Heal the wound and cure the illness, but let the dying spirit go. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Besides, when you say you're a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it's kind of irresistible. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Having replaced instinct with language, society, and culture, we are the only species that depends on teaching and learning. We aren't human without them. In them is true power. But are they the occupations of the rich and mighty? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for
so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A rock is a good thing, too, you know. If the Isles of Earthsea were all made of diamond, we'd lead a hard life here. Enjoy the illusions, lad, and let the rocks be rocks. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Our finest method of organized forgetting is called discovery. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It is as if i were dead, and this is the after-life, her in the sunlight, beyond the edge of the world, among the sons and daughters of the sea. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
They preserved autonomy of conscience even at the cost of becoming eccentric. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I could forget everything I'd lost, because I'd never had it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
But I think we will have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round an round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Grain grows best in shit... -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
For discipline is the channel in which our acts run strong and deep; where there is no direction, the deeds of men run shallow and wander and are wasted. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I was with you at the beginning of your journey. It is right that I should follow you to its end. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
For heroes do not make history - that is the historian's job - but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You know there's always prejudice in a revolutionary movement. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
An enemy, in Karhide, is not a stranger, an invader. The stranger who comes unknown is a guest. Your enemy is your neighbor. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I hope you'll understand that I am not quoting those great words lightly. I do mean it. Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There's no way to use power for good. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Students are intense people, they laugh and cry, they break down and rebuild. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
'The fact is,' I said, 'that you're unable, or unwilling, to believe in the fact that I believe in you.' -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It was not in Raj Lyubov's nature to think, "What can I do?" Character and training disposed him not to interfere in other men's business. His job was to find out what they did, and his inclination was to let them go on doing it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Here you think the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there's no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. people like to do things. They like to do them well. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
In this he saw that Ogion had been right: the shadow could not draw on his power, so long as he was turned against it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Ged stood sick and haggard. He said at last, "Better I had died." "Who are you to judge that, you for whom Nemmerle gave his life? - You are safe here. You will live here, and go on with your training. They tell me you were clever. Go on and do your work. Do it well. It is all you can do. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
She touched his face and tied his hair back for him. Her hands were cool. He had never felt anything pleasanter in all his life than the touch of her hands. He reached out for her hand. She was not there, she had gone. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I'm old to be raising a child. And she ... She obeys me, but only because she wants to."
"It's the only justification for obedience," Ged observed. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There's nothing wrong with me ... except acute chronic fear. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He looked at me. His firm, broad face showed weight-loss in deep shadows under the cheekbones, his eyes were sunken and his mouth sorely chapped and cracked. God knows what I looked like, when he looked like that. He smiled. 'With luck we shall make it, and without luck we shall not.' -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The first thing I can remember clearly is writing the way into the secret room. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He was never rash or hurried, but he was always read. It was the secret, no doubt, of the extraordinary political career he threw away for my sake; it was also the explanation of his belief in me and devotion to my mission. When I came, he was ready. Nobody else on Winter was. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The tongue they speak there is not like any spoken in the Archipelago or the other Reaches, and they are a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired, and fierce, liking the sight of blood and the smell of burning towns. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents to drink and be clean and irrigate with, using water mindfully, carefully. They lived in a land that answers greed with drought and death. A difficult land: aloof yet sensitive. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
And so, because he won't let himself be hurt, he does wrong to those he loves best. And then he sees that, and after all, it hurts him. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The Encyclopedia Planaria, in forty-four volumes, is not portable, and after all, what is entirely reliable unless it's dead? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
They tended to be stolid, slovenly, heavy, and to my eyes effeminate - not in the sense of delicacy, etc., but in just the opposite sense: a gross, bland fleshiness, a bovinity without point or edge. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Power inheres in a center. You're going to the center. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
But nobody in one lifetime could read more than a fragment of what was here, this broken labyrinth of words, this shattered, interrupted story of a people and a world through the centuries, the millennia. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He gave way to the fear that had come with her, the sense of the breaking of promises, the incoherence of Time. He broke. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same ... They can be neither separated, nor mixed. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
As a man's knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower; until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholely what he must do. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears them out, discards them, gets a new model. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Scientific truth will out, you can't hide the sun under a stone. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Lord Berosty rem ir Ipe came to Thangering Fastness and offered forty beryls and half the year's yield from his orchards as the price of a Foretelling, and the price was acceptable. He set his question to the Weaver Odren, and the question was, On what day shall I die? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What's wrong with pleasure, Takver? why don't you want it?"
"Nothing's wrong with it. And I do want it. Only I don't need it. And if I take what I don't need, I'll never get to what I do need. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To him a thinking man's job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism , Christianity , and Islam , and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism . For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Contrast J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. The author adopts the childish view of adults as inhumanly powerful and uncomprehending, and never goes beyond it; and so his novel, published for adults, is better appreciated by ten-year-olds. The -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The prisoner is the jailer's jailer. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
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
So rest a while, we can talk in the cool of the evening. Or the cool of the morning. There 's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.
-Hawk
Who had been Archmage
The Other Wind -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The premise is: everybody's like me and we all think alike.
The corollary is: people who don't think like me don't matter. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There's another option. You can consider the reader, not as a helpless victim or a passive consumer, but as an active, intelligent, worthy collaborator. A colluder, a coillusionist. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game ... speak the truth and hear the truth. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
An Odonian's goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
When we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
They made love. Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other's arms, holding love, asleep. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it; it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God's truth, the universe at once began to exist. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The art of one's own time tends to be formidable ... because we have to learn how and where to take hold of it, what response is being asked of us, before we can get involved. It's truly new, and therefore truly a bit frightening. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin
the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Then Ged pitied her. She was like a white deer caged, like a white bird wing-clipped, like a silver ring in an old man's finger. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
She'll die.'
'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name's the mother
of the ten thousand things. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
My Real Children starts quietly, then suddenly takes you on two roller-coaster rides at once, swooping dizzily through a double panorama and ending in a sort of super Sophie's Choice. A daring tour de force. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I've been looking only at what's to be done next and forgetting why we're doing it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Success is somebody else's failure. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman's power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Why must there be war?" "Oh Lavinia, what a woman's question that is! Because men are men. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Laws are made against the impulse a people most fears in itself. Do not kill was the Shing's vaunted single Law. All else was permitted: which meant, perhaps, there was little else they really wanted to do ... -- Ursula K. Le Guin
In diversity is life and where there's life there's hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don't have to learn."
Vokep shook his head grimly. "It's the kids," he said. "Having babies. Makes 'em propertarians. They won't let go." He sighed. "Touch and go, brother, that's the rule. Don't ever let yourself be owned. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
'Banished men should never speak their native tongue; it comes bitter from their mouth. And this language suits a traitor better, I think; drips off one's teeth like sugar-syrup.' -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Where there's property, there's theft. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Man's singularity is his divinity. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It's a queer business, making oneself blind. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To go under a river: there's a strange thing to do, a really weird idea. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Am I supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After all, he's just a man ... He's about fifty years old, and he's bald. And I'll bet he has to cut his toenails too like any other man. I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is, he'll be much godlier after he's dead. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The story is the way the story is told. Adam's -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I forgot, being too interested myself, that he's a king, and does not see things rationally, but as a king. All I've told him means to him simply that his power is threatened, his kingdom is a dust mote in space, his kingship is a joke to men who rule a hundred worlds. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A wizard's power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow ... -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer's job is to be its medium. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation
overcrowding
reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact
of being close to people, of being touched. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives ... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Ultimately you write alone. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
His eyes saved him. What they insisted on seeing and reporting to him took him out of the autism of terror. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I hate the bigotry you believe in. But I'll try not to hate you."
"Why?" he asked. His voice was cold, as she remembered it.
"Hate eats the hater," she quoted from a familiar text of the Telling. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Our souls are old,
often used before.
The knife outlasts
the hand that holds it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I think if you have lost a great happiness and try to recall it, you are only asking for sorrow, but if you do not try to dwell on the happiness, sometimes you find it dwelling in your heart and body, silent but sustaining. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Greed puts out the sun. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The room smelled of books, that subtle smell which to some is stuffy and to others intoxicating, and it was silent. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It is what it looks like and is called. A jail. it is not a front for something else, not a facade, not a pseudonym. It is real, the real thing, the thing behind the words. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Everything is old, here. We are old - the Masters."
"You're not," Irian said. She thought him between thirty and forty[ ... ]
"But I came far. Miles can be years. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?" "No - " "To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question." I -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If you play against your own side you'll lose the whole game. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
They have no gods. They work magic, and think they are gods themselves. But they are not. And when they die, they (...) become dust and bone, and their ghosts whine on the wind a little while till the wind blows them away. They do not have immortal souls. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I didn't know you well at all. Only, when you spoke, I seemed to see clear into you, into the center. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He had been groping and grabbing after certainty, as if it were something he could possess. He had been demanding a security, a guarantee, which is not granted: and which, if granted, would become a prison. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do - they never adapt either. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Not Afraid. I knew you were a person who ... wouldn't be forced ... Well, yes, I was afraid. I was afraid of you. Not of making a mistake. I knew it wasn't a mistake. But you were-yourself. You aren't like most people, you know. I was afraid of you because I knew you were my equal. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It doesn't make any difference if his end is good; means are all we've got -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If you go ahead, if you keep running, wherever you run you will meet danger and evil, for it drives you, it chooses the way you go. You must choose. You must seek what seeks you. You must hunt the hunter. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The sleeper dreamed. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The sleeper turns his back on everyone. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Why hadn't she been a detective instead of a goddamn stupid third-class civil rights lawyer? She hated the law. It took an aggressive, assertive personality. She didn't have it. She had a sneaky, sly, shy, squamous personality. She had French diseases of the soul. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Fact is one of our finest fictions. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We don't count relatives much; we are all relatives, you see. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What are we so afraid of? Why don't we let 'em tell us we're afraid? What is it they're afraid of?" She picked up the stocking she had been darning, turned it in her hands, was silent awhile; finally she said, "What are they afraid of us for? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
When you have nothing to pray for, that's when Luck hears you. If -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Solitude was his fate; he was trapped in his heredity. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Nobody owns anything to rob ... As for violence ... Oiie, would you murder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What good is power when you're too wise to use it? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Once you are there, once you walk through the wall with me, then as I see it you are one of us. We are responsible to you and you to us; you become an Anarresti, with the same options as all the others. But they are not safe options. Freedom is never very safe. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
My lord, do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way." There -- Ursula K. Le Guin
No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence. By -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn't know how to sell the product. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
This story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed, I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It was men's ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I think we all have archipelagoes in our minds. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The question was where to start. Where to build up a solid foundation of knowledge on which you could balance ideas. It wasn't exactly a modest ambition. But what I had learned from Natalie was that you could have a very immodest ambition if you went after it methodically. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What books didn't influence me? If only someone would ask that! I've been waiting for years to answer it. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, I will say, had absolutely no influence on me except to cause hours of incredulous boredom. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I felt the pressure of people all around me, all the time. People around me, people with me, people pressing on me, pressing me to be one of them, one of the people. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The really terrible thing about being young is the triviality -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Where will you sleep?" he inquired, sitting down heavily on the bed. "No where," the Alien replied, its toneless voice dividing the word into two equally significant wholes. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A man wants his virility regarded. A woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. [Here] one is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Offering
I made a poem going
to sleep last night, woke
in sunlight, it was clean forgotten.
If it was any good, gods
of the great darkness
where sleep goes and farther
death goes, you not named,
then as true offering
accept it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number - Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysis, every now and then. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I supposed? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There are a limited number of plots (some say seven, some say twelve, some say thirty). There is no limit to the number of stories. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I am sorry, I am very sorry to ask you to lie, he said, so earnestly that I wondered if it hurt him to lie. That made him seem more like a god than a human being. If it hurt to lie, how could you stay alive? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
But when we crave power over life - endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality - then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
[T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He, after all, had no standards of manliness, of virility, to complicate his pride. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
new worlds were born of their talking. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The nod of a head is such a small thing, it can mean so little, yet it is the gesture of assent that allows, that makes to be. The nod is the gesture of power, the yes. The numen. the presence of the sacred, is called by its name. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Take care, Tenar," he said. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
My dogs have barked at a beggar tonight and he proves a prince of starlight. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
They move their heads around and flatten out their mouth and nose on the other person's mouth and nose and open their mouths in different ways, and you are supposed to feel sort of hot or wet or something as you watch. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Oh Lavinia, Lavinia, you are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Had his fear, in fact, been the personal fear that Selver might having learnt the racial hatred, reject him and treat him not as you but as one of them. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words! -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Facts are no more slid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. Bot both are sensitive. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Only shadow can fight shadow.Only darkness can defeath the dark. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To say that an Orgota government fell means, of course, only that one group of Commensals replaced another group of Commensals in the controlling offices of the Thirty-Three. Some shadows got shorter and some longer, as they say in Karhide. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I hate complaining to strangers
you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead. In -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Wold felt sorry for him, as he often did for young men, who have not seen how passion and plan over and over are wasted, how their lives and acts are wasted between desire and fear. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If they come prying they can leave curious. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I had ignored that black cellar and gone looking for the substance of Orgoreyn aboveground, in daylight. No wonder nothing had seemed real. I -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
. . . all delight being in the present and its past, all truth too, and all fidelity in the word, the flesh, the present moment: for the future, however you look at it, contains only one sure thing and that is death. But the moment is unpredictable. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I was afraid I'd fail. So I didn't work.' And there it was, plain as a glass of water, the truth, which he had never admitted to himself. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society, and its rules, as he from his. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There were several completely mysterious electrical devices connected with the washstand, and the water valve did not cut off when you released the faucet but kept pouring out until shut off - a sign, Shevek thought, either of great faith in human nature, or of great quantities of hot water. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
George Orr stayed in Portland because he had always lived there and because he had no reason to believe that life anywhere else would be better, or different. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Most best-sellers are written for readers who are willing to be passive consumers. The blurbs on their covers often highlight the coercive, aggressive power of the text - compulsive page-turner, gut-wrenching, jolting, mind-searing, heart-stopping - what is this, electroshock torture? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He had made follow him. He had called her by her name, and she had come crouching to his hand. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
But I liked the writing better. I could make it look beautiful. I could keep it. The spoken words just went out like the wind, and you always had to say them all over again to keep them alive. But the writing stayed, and you could learn to make it better. More beautiful. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Light is the left hand of darkness. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You see, I don't write the way I was trained to write at the conservatory. I write dysfunctional music. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I suspect that the distinction between a maternal and a paternal instinct is scarcely worth making; the parental instinct, the wish to protect, to further, is not a sex-linked characteristic ... -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
In war everybody is a prisoner. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I only ask your help, for which I have nothing to give in return."
"Nothing? You call your theory nothing"
"Weigh it in the balance with the freedom of one single human spirit," he said, turning to her, "and which will weigh heavier? Can you tell? I cannot. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I came to the center of the maze following him. Now I must find my way back out alone. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government in earth, it would be a great joy to serve it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Stealthily the stars slid forward into nothingness. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He laid his hands on her head, pushing back the hood. He began to speak. His voice was soft, and the words were in no tongue she had ever heard. The sound of them came into her heart like rain falling. She grew still to listen. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after "semicolons," and another one after "now." And -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Some men who live hard and in good health can't believe sickness or weakness is anything but laziness, a sham. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
But I, who am old, who have done what I must do, who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know that there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light. They could not hide you. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I had of course met with incredulity..., but seldom with a will to incredulity. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It is very seldom," the young man said at last, "that dragons ask to do men favours."
"But it is very common," said the dragon, "for cats to play with mice before they kill them. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He thought of death, in that gap between the beginning of a step and its completion, and at the end of the step he stood on a new earth. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
But you're so strong. I wish I were strong. I just like eating. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You can keep up that crap for years. But it finally catches up with you. And then you realise all you've done is save your shit to drown in. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The Owl thinks slowly, but the Owl thinks long. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It is useless work that darkens the heart. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer, -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It was the idea of writing with a specific audience in mind or a specific age of reader that scared me off. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We demand a rebellious spirit of those who have no chance to learn that rebellion is possible, but we the privileged hold still and see no evil. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Who do you think is lying to us?" Shevek demanded.
Placid, Bedap met his gaze. "Who, brother? Who but ourselves? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
When all ways are lost the way is clear. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To hear, one must be silent. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I lied. I lied. I lied. I lied deliberately, knowingly, well. She lied. She is a liar. She is an intellectual too! She is a lie. And a coward, afraid. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Honestly, orthodoxy concerns me about as much as it concerns your average jackrabbit. I only follow rules that take me where I want to go. If there aren't any rules, I make up my own (and follow them strictly). -- Ursula K. Le Guin
O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It is the nature of the idea to be communicated, written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass it craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows stronger from being stepped on. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies ... -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Hideo," said my mother, in the terrifying way women have of passing without interval from one subject to another because they have them all present in their mind at once, "you haven't found any kind of relationship? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I'm a lazy man. With lazy dreams. I need Tai to wake me up, make me vibrate, irritate me. I need my angry woman, my unforgiving friend. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
They were without shame and without desire, like the angels. But it is not human to be without shame and without desire. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
And she told me the same thing, she said that when I came back in the winter, she was going to miss missing me ... -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There is no kingdom like the forests. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We can't stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
She sipped her coffee and brandy, which would have grown hair on a Chihuahua. There -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said ... 'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
But you're not a traitor, you've merely been the tool of one. I don't punish tools. They do harm only in the hands of a bad workman. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A warm body sighed in the darkness inside the little bright object balanced elegantly in the orbit of the moon. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wouldn't be taken, but chose my man and my fate. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I don't know. I love the idea of democracy, the hope, yes, I love that. I couldn't live without that. But the country? You mean the thing on the map, lines, everything inside the lines is good and nothing outside them matters? How can an adult love such a childish idea? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The word he used was not "wallowing," there being no animals on Anarres to make wallows; it was a compound, meaning literally "coating continually and thickly with excrement." The flexibility and precision of Pravic lent itself to the creation of vivid metaphors quite unforeseen by its inventors. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What is life without incompatible realities? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Figurines and souvenirs and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion ... But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He saw time turn back upon itself, a river flowing upward to the spring. He held the contemporaneity of two moments in his left and right hands; as he moved them apart he smiled to see the moments separate like dividing soap bubbles. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
How you play is what you win. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
... what I told them was 'a poem,' a thing made by a maker, a work of art, part history of long ago, part invention. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Age and illness made one a dualist -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Oh, Hank," Susan whispered, "their wings are furry."
"Oh, James," Harriet whispered, "their hands are kind. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It always seemed to me they're sort of alike ... magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
But she knew, though very vaguely, that she was crying, because hope hurts terribly when it breaks through the resignation in which you have lived for days. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Life in the auntring, or for a settled man, is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I am tired of safe places, and roofs, and walls around me. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The story is not in the plot but in the telling. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
They can send death at once, but life is slower... -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. "If it is not, what is?" He could not endure those remembered words. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
But I can't say that gratitude was my motive for infringing on the Law of Cultural Embargo. I was not paying my debt to him. Such debts remain owing. Estraven and I had simply arrived at the point where we shared whatever we had that was worth sharing. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Time is not duration but intensity; time is the beat and the interval [ ... ] -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He copulated with a number of girls, but copulation was not the joy it ought to be. It was a mere relief of need, like evacuating, and he felt ashamed of it afterward because it involved another person as object. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A man gives out, dearie. A woman takes in. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
She had made these with scrap wire and tools from the craft supply depot, and called them Occupations of Uninhabited Space. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
My heart told me incontrovertibly that neither gender could go far without the other. So, in my story, neither the woman nor the man can get free without the other. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Almost everything is double like that for adolescents; their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall; they see through everything, and are blind. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The machine conceals the machinations. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
And he would watch the snow falling, thin and ceaseless, on the empty lands below the window, and feel the dull cold grow within him, till it seemed no feeling was left to him except a kind of weariness. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair ... Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Somehow is a super-weasel, a word that betrays that the author didn't want to bother thinking out the story - "Somehow -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Do you know how to read?" "No. It is one of the black arts." He nodded. "But a useful one," he said. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I tried to think about what he had asked me to do, to step so far beyond myself. I found it difficult to think about. It was as if it hung over me, this huge choice I must make, this future I could not imagine. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Even a poet cannot get everything right. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We're not outside the world... We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is their in our world? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The Old Powers of earth are not for men to use. They were never given into our hands, and in our hands they work only ruin. Ill means, ill end. I was not drawn here, but driven here, and the force that drove me works to my undoing. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The most winning characteristic of the rather harsh Cetian temperament was curiosity, inopportune, and inexhaustible curiosity; Cetians died eagerly, curious as to what came next. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Honorifics and meaningless ritual phrases of greeting, leave-taking, permission-asking, and false gratitude, please, thank you, you're welcome, goodbye, fossil relics of primitive hypocrisy - all were stumbling blocks to truthfulness between producer-consumers. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
They just came to look, as if she were the Great Tower in Rodarred, or the Canyon of the Tulaevea. A phenomenon, a monument. They were awed, adoring. She snarled at them: Think your own thoughts! -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I write with all my heart -- Ursula K. Le Guin
In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
With eye and hand and breath and will. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Hector had no virtue?" "Of course he did. He won all his battles, till the last one." "We all do," Aeneas remarked. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
One must work with time and not against it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
True understanding is the spur of genius -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I don't know which I should fear more ... death or life. I wish I could be done with fear. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I am yours by parentage and custom and by duty undertaken towards you. I am your wizard. But it is time you recalled that, tough I am a servant, I am not your servant. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I respect commas far more than I respect congressmen. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We've made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can't see them, because they're part of our thinking. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What will the creature made all of sea-drift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking? His -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You were the vessel of evil. The Evil is poured out. It is done. It is buried in it's own tomb. You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light -- Ursula K. Le Guin
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
For the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He was born to be alone, a damned cold intellectual, an egoist. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
My advice to young writers is, if you can't marry money, at least don't marry envy. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
People had huddled back into the old core of the city; and once the suburbs had been looted, they burned. Like Moscow in 1812, acts of God or vandalism: they were no longer wanted, and they burned. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To deny the past is to deny the future. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I fear liars, and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country well. Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts long enough. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Orr was not a fast reasoner. In fact, he was not a reasoner. He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
An artist makes the world her world. An artist makes her world the world. For a little while. For as long as it takes to look at or listen or to watch or read the work of art. Like a crystal, the work of art seems to contain the whole, and to imply eternity. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
All that grieved me - that I was half one thing and half another and nothing wholly - was the sorrow of my childhood, but the strength and use of my life after I grew up. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The quality and virtue of a slave is invisibility. The powerless need to be invisible even to themselves. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He also had a kind of helpless politeness, which I took advantage of. He was quite incapable of refusing a direct request, and so, because I asked him to, he invited me to several parties during the month I stayed in Hemgogn. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Talking about it changed it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Her despair grew so great that it burst her breast open and like a bird of fire shattered the stone and broke out into the light of day
the light of day, faint in her windowless room. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical ... There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A library is a focal point, a sacred place to a community; and its sacredness is its accessibility, its publicness. It's everybody's place". -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Tezyeme," he said, which meant something on the order of "it is happening the way it is supposed to happen. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice we must not act without. Who am i-though i have the power to do it- to punish and reward, playing with men's destinies? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Dreams take short cuts. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The admirable is inexplicable. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth? -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
When at last I learned forgetting, I learned it very quickly and all too well. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We can't restructure our society without restructuring the English language. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Boris Pasternak said that poetry makes itself from the relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Go to bed; tired is stupid. Tomorrow -- Ursula K. Le Guin
But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
THE DOMESTICATION OF HUNCH -- Ursula K. Le Guin
And mage and sailor are not so far apart; both work with the powers of sky and sea, and bend great winds to the uses of their hands, bringing near what was remote. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin urges authors to remember why they do what they do. Her argument is that writing is an form of art rather than a commodity. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Interruptions were sometimes more frequent than statements. The process, compared to a well-managed executive conference, was a slab of raw beef compared to a wiring diagram. Raw beef, however, functions better than a wiring diagram would, in its place - inside a living animal. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We men dream dreams, we work magic, we do good, we do evil. The dragons do not dream. They are dreams. They do not work magic: it is their substance, their being. They do not do; they are. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
How did you get all this?" "Stole it," said the one-time prime minister of Karhide, -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Those who dislike fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled by science. They don't like either hobbits, or quasars; they don't feel at home with them; they don't want complexities, remoteness. If there is any such connection, I'll bet that it is basically an aesthetic one -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Then I saw ... you see ... I saw that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't save each other. Or ourselves. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The life of every man is in the Center of Time, for all were seen in the seeing of Meshe, and are in his eye. We are the pupils of his Eye ... Our doing is his Seeing: our being is his Knowing. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I wore his blood for clothing, on my legs and thighs and hands: a dry, stiff, brown garment with no warmth in it. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
What good seeking the safe course, on a journey such as this? There are senseless courses, which I shall not take; but there is no safe one. Streth -- Ursula K. Le Guin
They praised his modesty and did not listen to him, for listening is a rare gift, and men will have their heroes. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
In this effort to attain security, independence and privacy of course were suspect.... -- Ursula K. Le Guin
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then. I -- Ursula K. Le Guin
They were not victors, he and his kind, not in any way, they were the defeated still, for they had become like their betters. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Most bigots are sincere. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
The interplay of the aesthetic with the erotic is complex. The peacock's tail is beautiful to us, sexy to the peahen. Beauty and sexual attractiveness overlap, coincide. They may be deeply related. I think they should not be confused. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I never knew anybody, anywhere I have been, who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth, from orbit. -- Ursula K. Le Guin