Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

431 Sourced Quotes

But when people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always was a writer. I didn't want to be a writer and lead the writer's life and be glamorous and go to New York. I just wanted to do my job writing, and to do it really well.

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
After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory.

Ursula K. Le Guin
There are no right answers to wrong questions...

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
Shelley was kicked out of Oxford—I think the story is unauthenticated, but who cares—because he painted a sign on the end wall of a dead-end alley: THIS WAY TO HEAVEN. I feel that every now and then his sign needs repainting.

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
All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.

Ursula K. Le Guin
A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.

Ursula K. Le Guin
My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?

Ursula K. Le Guin
I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying. It would be foolish to worry about anything while one died.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other—outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.

Ursula K. Le Guin
We in the Handdara don't want answers. It's hard to avoid them, but we try to.
Faxe, I don't think I understand.
Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask.
But you're the Answerers!
You don't see, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?
No—
To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.

Ursula K. Le Guin
To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.
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
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
I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to. (There is quite an array of jets, buses and hacks which you can ride to Success; but that is a different destination.) It is a pretty wild country. There are, of course, roads. Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.

Ursula K. Le Guin
I just knew from extremely early on — it sounds ridiculous, but five or six — that writing was something I was going to do, always.

Ursula K. Le Guin
For a word to be spoken, Ged answered slowly, there must be silence. Before, and after. Then all at once he got up, saying, I have no right to speak of these things. The word that was mine to say I said wrong. It is better that I keep still; I will not speak again. Maybe there is no true power but the dark.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

Ursula K. Le Guin
He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.

Ursula K. Le Guin
They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!

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
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. And he felt it, too.

Ursula K. Le Guin
There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty. Arren found himself unwilling to stay on these cold summits. He said after a little while, I see why you say that only men do evil, I think. Even sharks are innocent; they kill because they must.
That is why nothing else can resist us. Only one thing in the world can resist an evil-hearted man. And that is another man. In our shame is our glory. Only our spirit, which is capable of evil, is capable of overcoming it.

Ursula K. Le Guin
All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?

Ursula K. Le Guin
Where my guides lead me in kindness
I follow, follow lightly,
and there are no footprints
in the dust behind us.

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
I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.

Ursula K. Le Guin