Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

431 Sourced Quotes

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
There's nothing to fear, Lebannen, he said gently, mockingly. They were only the dead.

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
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
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 thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Sometimes a god comes, Selver said. He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.

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
He felt that sense of being necessary which is the burden and reward of parenthood.

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
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
What's wrong with changing things? Now, I wonder if this self-canceling, centerpoised personality of yours leads you to look at things defensively. I want you to try to detach yourself from yourself and try to see your own viewpoint from the outside, objectively. You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life's not a static object, after all. It's a process. There's no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life-evolution-the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy—existence itself—is essentially change.

Ursula K. Le Guin
To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.

Ursula K. Le Guin
There's a point, around age twenty, Bedap said, 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
There are souls... whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never get 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
All I know is the dark, the night underground. And that's all there really is. That's all there is to know, in the end. The silence, and the dark. You know everything, wizard. But I know one thing—the one true thing!

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
Her left hand reminded her of its existence, and she looked round to see what was scratching the heel of her hand. It was a tiny thistle, crouched in a crack in the sandstone, barely lifting its colorless spikes into the light and wind. It nodded stiffly as the wind blew, resisting the wind, rooted in rock. She gazed at it for a long time.

Ursula K. Le Guin
We may suffer for it when the balance of things rights itself, but we do not lose hope and forego art and forget the words of the Making. Nature is not unnatural. This is not a righting of the balance, but an upsetting of it. There is only one creature who can do that.
A man? Arren said, tentative.
We men.
How?
By an unmeasured desire for life.
For life? But it isn't wrong to want to live?
No. 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
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
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
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
Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens.

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
There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time. As all the stars may be reflected in a round raindrop falling in the night: so too do all the stars reflect the raindrop. There is neither darkness nor death, for all things are, in the Light of the Moment, and their end and their beginning are one.

Ursula K. Le Guin