Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

431 Sourced Quotes

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
Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation — overcrowding — reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact — of being close to people, of being touched.

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
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

Ursula K. Le Guin
She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Heal the Wound, Cure the illness, but let the Dying spirit go

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
But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Do remember, though, that unless you're a playwright, the result [dialogue] isn't what you want; it's only an element of what you want. Actors embody and re-create the words of drama. In fiction, a tremendous amount of story and character may be given through the dialogue, but the story-world and its people have to be created by the storyteller. If there's nothing in it but disembodied voices, too much is missing.

Ursula K. Le Guin
He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The High-Intelligence Life Forms of the planet, of which there were at least three species, all of low technological achievement, they would ignore or enslave or extirpate, whichever was most convenient. For to an aggressive people only technology mattered.

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

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