Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

431 Sourced Quotes

All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.

Ursula K. Le Guin
We sleep researchers like cats, you know; they sleep a lot!

Ursula K. Le Guin
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

Ursula K. Le Guin
"There was a pretty prince of Troy named Paris. He and a Greek queen ran off together. Her husband called the other kings of Greece together, and they went to Troy, a great army in a thousand beaked ships, to get the woman back. Helen was her name."
"What did they want her back for?"
"Her husband's honor demanded it."
"I should think his honor demanded that he divorce her and find himself a decent wife."
"Lavinia, these people were Greeks."

Ursula K. Le Guin
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.

Ursula K. Le Guin
I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.

Ursula K. Le Guin
As we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world's summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life.

Ursula K. Le Guin
We're not outside the world, yoz. You know? We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see?

Ursula K. Le Guin
Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place.

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
The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there — you build yourself. Those are the high ones, the thick ones, the ones with no doors.

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
When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always — I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me — is that the form leads you to what you want to say.

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
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
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
One voice, speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time; plenty of time.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.

Ursula K. Le Guin
How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught?

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 atomic bomb.

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. We have nothing else to give.

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
Men are afraid of virgins, but they have a cure for their own fear and the virgin's virginity.

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
Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.

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
But what's the good of this sort of 'understanding,' Dearri said, if it doesn't result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn't it?
You ask questions like a true profiteer, Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction.

Ursula K. Le Guin
You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that's precisely what our society is doing!

Ursula K. Le Guin
The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.

Ursula K. Le Guin