Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

431 Sourced Quotes

You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

Ursula K. Le Guin
No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.

Ursula K. Le Guin
By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.

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
There's people all over these parts, and maybe beyond, who think, as you said, that nobody can be wise alone. So these people try to hold to each other.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Summon up a supper, he said. Oh, I could. On golden plates, if you like. But that's illusion, and when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Words are my matter. I have chipped one stone
for thirty years and still it is not done,
that image of the thing I cannot see.
I cannot finish it and set it free,
transformed to energy.

Ursula K. Le Guin
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Ursula K. Le Guin
She had come to Aka to learn how to sing this world's tune, to dance its dance; and at last, she thought, away from the city's endless noise, she was beginning to hear the music and to learn how to move to it.

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
Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

Ursula K. Le Guin
A man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.

Ursula K. Le Guin
He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Character and training disposed him not to interfere in other mens's business. His job was to find out what they did, and his inclination was to let them go on doing it. He preferred to be enlightened, rather than to enlighten; to seek facts rather than the Truth. But even the most unmissionary soul, unless he pretend he has no emotions, is sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. What are they doing? abruptly becomes, What are we doing? and then, What must I do?

Ursula K. Le Guin
There's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.

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
What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the greatest revolution of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol twisted aside, and the lie come to be.

Ursula K. Le Guin
It seemed, at least, that they had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.

Ursula K. Le Guin
No, I don't understand him, but he is worth listening to.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.

Ursula K. Le Guin
If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.

Ursula K. Le Guin
We live well in the houses—well enough. But we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars, and now we dare not go a hundred miles from home. We keep a little knowledge, and do nothing with it. But once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life. We did man's work.

Ursula K. Le Guin
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

Ursula K. Le Guin
A great deal of her obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with words and ideas. Nobody had ever taught her to think consecutively. Nobody had ever listened to what she said. All that was expected, all that was wanted of her was muddle, mystery, mumbling. She was a witchwoman. She had nothing to do with clear meaning.

Ursula K. Le Guin
When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.

Ursula K. Le Guin
We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

Ursula K. Le Guin
We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

Ursula K. Le Guin