Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

431 Sourced Quotes

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.

Ursula K. Le Guin
When asked how she feels about term science fiction as connected to her work:
I don't think science fiction is a very good name for it, but it's the name that we've got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own.

Ursula K. Le Guin
You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, "Am I popular?" I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!

Ursula K. Le Guin
I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

Ursula K. Le Guin
If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion....But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.

Ursula K. Le Guin
All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. [...] No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot get back to seeing the part as the whole.

Ursula K. Le Guin
While we read a novel, we are insane — bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Ursula K. Le Guin
If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.

Ursula K. Le Guin
But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord." "It might to keep it open.

Ursula K. Le Guin
They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit's strength lies in holding fast to the truth.

Ursula K. Le Guin
A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

Ursula K. Le Guin
All the mystery and wisdom of the Masters, when it's out in the daylight, doesn't amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade—wonderful illusions. But people don't want to know that. They want the illusions, the mysteries. Who can blame them? There's so little in life that's beautiful or worthy.

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
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
It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.

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

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
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
How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught?

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

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

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