Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

431 Sourced Quotes

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
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
It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

Ursula K. Le Guin
It always seemed to me they're sort of alike, he said, magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.

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
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

Ursula K. Le Guin
A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.

Ursula K. Le Guin
He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work—his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy—and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Is it a wicked thing, then?
I should call it a misunderstanding, rather. A misunderstanding of life. Death and life are the same thing—like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same... They can be neither separated, nor mixed.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise.

Ursula K. Le Guin
At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.

Ursula K. Le Guin
What harm have the trees done them? he said. Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men.

Ursula K. Le Guin
To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind, it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Uninfluenced by others, he never knew he influenced them; he had no idea they liked him.

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
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
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
What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.
Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.

Ursula K. Le Guin
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.

Ursula K. Le Guin