Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

431 Sourced Quotes

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
We sleep researchers like cats, you know; they sleep a lot!

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
The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?

Ursula K. Le Guin
Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live.

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

Ursula K. Le Guin
What is a woman's power then?" she asked. "I don't think we know." "When has a woman power because she's a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while..." "In her house, maybe." She looked around the kitchen. "But the doors are shut," she said, "the doors are locked." "Because you're valuable." "Oh yes. We're precious. So long as we're powerless.

Ursula K. Le Guin
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
Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.

Ursula K. Le Guin
A king has soldiers, servants, messengers, lieutenants. He governs through his servants. Where are the servants of this—Anti-king?
In our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live! The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple.

Ursula K. Le Guin
You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

Ursula K. Le Guin
And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.

Ursula K. Le Guin
But you knew them to be evil men—
Was I to join them therefore? To let their acts rule my own? I will not make their choices for them, nor will I let them make mine for me!

Ursula K. Le Guin
"I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that I when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I lived, the breath I breathed."

Ursula K. Le Guin
The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.

Ursula K. Le Guin
But now you've come too far, and I warn you, woman! I will not have you set foot on this domain. And if you cross my will or dare so much as speak to me again, I will have you driven from Re Albi, and off the Overfell, with the dogs at your heels. Have you understood me?
No, Tenar said, I have never understood men like you.

Ursula K. Le Guin
I just knew from extremely early on — it sounds ridiculous, but five or six — that writing was something I was going to do, always.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I'm sorry. When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.

Ursula K. Le Guin
As she stumbled forward she cried out in her mind, which was as dark, as shaken as the subterranean vault, Forgive me. O my Masters, O unnamed ones, most ancient ones, forgive me, forgive me!
There was no answer. There had never been an answer.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Shelley was kicked out of Oxford—I think the story is unauthenticated, but who cares—because he painted a sign on the end wall of a dead-end alley: THIS WAY TO HEAVEN. I feel that every now and then his sign needs repainting.

Ursula K. Le Guin
There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.

Ursula K. Le Guin
We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.

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