Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

431 Sourced Quotes

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

Ursula K. Le Guin
He knew that in so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

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
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

Ursula K. Le Guin
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

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
The menopause is probably the least glamorous topic imaginable; and this is interesting, because it is one of the very few topics to which cling some shreds and remnants of taboo. A serious mention of menopause is usually met with uneasy silence; a sneering reference to it is usually met with relieved sniggers. Both the silence and the sniggering are pretty sure indications of taboo.

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 First Envoy to a world always comes alone. One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Mr. Ai, we've seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they'd seem the same to us.

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
I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.

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
No, I don't understand him, but he is worth listening to.

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
The more defensive a society, the more conformist.

Ursula K. Le Guin
When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. or wonder who, after all, you are.

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
He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work—his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy—and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing -- instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?

Ursula K. Le Guin
All the mystery and wisdom of the Masters, when it's out in the daylight, doesn't amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade—wonderful illusions. But people don't want to know that. They want the illusions, the mysteries. Who can blame them? There's so little in life that's beautiful or worthy.

Ursula K. Le Guin
What harm have the trees done them? he said. Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men.

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