Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

431 Sourced Quotes

I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.

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
The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.

Ursula K. Le Guin
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself

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
The first thing about rocks is, they're old.... Rocks are in time in a different way than living things are, even the ancient trees. But then, the other thing about rocks is that they are place. Rocks are what a place is made of to start with and after all... The stone is at the center.

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
There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.

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
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 whole process of getting old—it could have been better arranged.

Ursula K. Le Guin