Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes & Sayings

There are talking dogs all over the place, unbelievably boring they are, on and on and on about sex and shit and smells, and smells and shit and sex, and do you love me, do you love me, do you love me. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Dragons think we are amusing. But they remember Erreth-Akbe. They speak of him as if he were a dragon, not a man. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

From "A Left-Handed Commencement Address," Mills College 1983 — Ursula K. Le Guin

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principle moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don't realize that. And you can't write unless you read. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I hope you'll understand that I am not quoting those great words lightly. I do mean it. Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom. — Ursula K. Le Guin

And none could cry Murder, but only Justice done. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I was willing to believe him that most modern writing was trash, on the evidence that so much old writing was trash; but I didn't put it that way to him. — Ursula K. Le Guin

He was one whose power was akin to, and as strong as, the Old Powers of the earth; one who talked with dragons, and held off earthquakes with his word. And there he lay asleep on the dirt, with a little thistle growing by his hand. It was very strange. Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed. The glory of the sky touched his dusty hair, and turned the thistle gold for a little while. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child ... that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination. — Ursula K. Le Guin

She could not have been born gray. Her
color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed
nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people's world. She had not been born. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A wizard's power of Changing and of 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

To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography. For the ultimate selling job on ultimate violence one must read those works of fiction issued by our government as manuals of civil defense, in which you learn that there's nothing to be afraid of if you've stockpiled lots of dried fruit. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws. — Ursula K. Le Guin

[Arren] was proud of his lineage, but thought of himself as an heir of princes, one of the House of Enlad. Morred, from whom that house descended, had been dead two thousand years. His deeds were matter of legends, not of this present world. It was as if the Archmage had named him son of myth, inheritor of dreams. — Ursula K. Le Guin

He is the earth and sunlight, the leaves of trees, the eagle's flight. He is alive. And all who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. — Ursula K. Le Guin

There are dance artists, painting artists and writing artists. Authors are writing artists. You can practice art in whatever medium you choose, and words are mine. — Ursula K. Le Guin

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

History is not a science, it's an art. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal, The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.
It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't "get into" me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.
The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names
Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the storm cloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren't people. They don't love and hate, they aren't for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live. — Ursula K. Le Guin

An artist makes the world her world. An artist makes her world the world. For a little while. For as long as it takes to look at or listen or to watch or read the work of art. Like a crystal, the work of art seems to contain the whole, and to imply eternity. — Ursula K. Le Guin

How do I know," she said at last, "that you are what you seem to be?"
"You don't," Said he. "I don't know what I seem, to you. — 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

There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Incommunicable. Language used for communication with individual-persons will not contain other forms of relationship. Jor Jor." The right hand, a great, greenish, flipperlike extremity, came forward in a slow and perhaps tentative fashion. "Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe." Orr shook hands with it. It stood immobile, apparently regarding him, though no eyes were visible inside the dark-tinted, vapor-filled headpiece. If it was a headpiece. Was there in fact any substantial form within that green carapace, that mighty armor? He didn't know. He felt, however, completely at ease with Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe. "I don't suppose," he said, on impulse again, "that you ever knew anyone named Lelache?" "Lelache. No. Do you seek Lelache." "I have lost Lelache." "Crossings in mist," the — Ursula K. Le Guin

But I'm not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely! — Ursula K. Le Guin

He was never rash or hurried, but he was always read. It was the secret, no doubt, of the extraordinary political career he threw away for my sake; it was also the explanation of his belief in me and devotion to my mission. When I came, he was ready. Nobody else on Winter was. — Ursula K. Le Guin

When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. — Ursula K. Le Guin

They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism. — Ursula K. Le Guin

He took pleasure in her inconsequential talk just as he did in the sunshine and the snow. — Ursula K. Le Guin

But 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 must follow knowledge, and serve need. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Fact is one of our finest fictions. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Even the best weapon is an unhappy tool, hateful to living things. So the follower of the Way stays away from it. Weapons are unhappy tools, not chosen by thoughtful people, to be used only when there is no choice, and with a calm, still mind, without enjoyment. To enjoy using weapons is to enjoy killing people, and to enjoy killing people is to lose your share in the common good. It is right that the murder of many people be mourned and lamented. It is right that a victor in war be received with funeral ceremonies. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Why is it that if you say you don't enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren't going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as "loathing" it?
The little Time article itself is fairly accurate about what I've said about e-reading, but the title of the series, "Famous Writers Who Loathe E-Books," reflects or caters to a silly idea: that not being interested in using a particular technology is the same as hating and despising it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

'The fact is,' I said, 'that you're unable, or unwilling, to believe in the fact that I believe in you.' — Ursula K. Le Guin

Justice is in the hands of the gods, an old poet wrote, mortal hands hold only mercy and the sword. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I am sorry, I am very sorry to ask you to lie, he said, so earnestly that I wondered if it hurt him to lie. That made him seem more like a god than a human being. If it hurt to lie, how could you stay alive? — Ursula K. Le Guin

Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it's then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty. — Ursula K. Le Guin

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I know that I am going to meet a personal variation on reality; a partial view of reality. But I know also that by that partiality, that distancing from the shared experience, it will be new: a revelation. It will be a vision, a more or less powerful or haunting dream. A space-voyage through somebody else's psychic abysses. It will fall short of tragedy, because tragedy is the truth, and truth is what the very great artists, the absolute novelists, tell. It will not be truth; but it will be imagination. Truth is best. For it encompasses tragedy and partakes of the eternal joy. But very few of us know it; the best we can do is recognize it. Imagination - to me - is the next best. For it partakes of Creation, which is one aspect of the eternal joy.
All the rest is either Politics or Pedantry, or Mainstream Fiction, may it rest in peace. — Ursula K. Le Guin

This was a great magic. Festin had no more performed it than has any man who in exile or danger longs for the earth and waters of his home, seeing and yearning over the doorsill of his house, the table where he has eaten, the branches outside the window of the room where he has slept. Only in dreams do any but the great Mages realize this magic of going home. — Ursula K. Le Guin

. . . all delight being in the present and its past, all truth too, and all fidelity in the word, the flesh, the present moment: for the future, however you look at it, contains only one sure thing and that is death. But the moment is unpredictable. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can seperate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that's already between us, the distance of our sex, the differance of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, he comes back — 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

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

No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. — Ursula K. Le Guin

For to keep dark the mind of the mageborn, that is a dangerous thing. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I think we all have archipelagoes in our minds. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Talking about it changed it. — 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 ... There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness. — Ursula K. Le Guin

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We can't restructure our society without restructuring the English language. — Ursula K. Le Guin

You are beautiful," Tenar said in a different tone. "Listen to me, Therru. Come here. You have scars, ugly scars, because an ugly, evil thing was done to you. People see the scars. But they see you, too, and you aren't the scars. You aren't ugly. You aren't evil. You are Therru, and beautiful. You are Therru who can work, and walk, and run, and dance, beautifully, in a red dress. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A library is a focal point, a sacred place to a community; and its sacredness is its accessibility, its publicness. It's everybody's place". — Ursula K. Le Guin

This writing doesn't affect reality any more than any writing does; that is to say, indirectly, but considerably. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in. — Ursula K. Le Guin

They can send death at once, but life is slower... — Ursula K. Le Guin

You're a respectable woman, dearie, and her reputation is a woman's wealth."
"Her wealth," Tenar repeated in the same blank way; then she said it again: "Her wealth. Her treasure. Her hoard. Her value ... — Ursula K. Le Guin

I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them, all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal?-What is it but death-death without rebirth? — Ursula K. Le Guin

It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Talk is an art and a pleasure, not a matter of mere use and need. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes. I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known. — Ursula K. Le Guin

There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We are all contingent. Resentment is foolish and ungenerous, and even anger is inadequate. I am a fleck of light on the surface of the sea, a glint of light from the evening star. I live in awe. If I never lived at all, yet I am a silent wing on the wind, a bodiless voice in the forest of Albunea. I speak, but all I can say is: Go, go on. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The sleeper turns his back on everyone. — 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 ... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. — Ursula K. Le Guin

And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all. — Ursula K. Le Guin

On the blank leaf glued to the inner back cover I drew the double curve within the circle, and blacked the yin half of the symbol, then pushed it back to my companion. 'Do you know that sign?'
He looked at it a long time with a strange look, but he said, 'No.'
'It's found on Earth, and on Hain-Davenant, and on Chiffewar. It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.' — Ursula K. Le Guin

Her despair grew so great that it burst her breast open and like a bird of fire shattered the stone and broke out into the light of day
the light of day, faint in her windowless room. — 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

Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question. — Ursula K. Le Guin

And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this
letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable
but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever. — Ursula K. Le Guin

You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do - they never adapt either. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Some men who live hard and in good health can't believe sickness or weakness is anything but laziness, a sham. — Ursula K. Le Guin

By and large books are mankind's best invention. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It is as if i were dead, and this is the after-life, her in the sunlight, beyond the edge of the world, among the sons and daughters of the sea. — Ursula K. Le Guin

She waved through the dirty window from her seat as the train started up. I did not do the ape act. I stood there and did the human act as well as possible. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The creative adult is the child who has survived. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The creative adult is the child who survived after the world tried killing them, making them grown up. The creative adult is the child who survived the blandness of schooling, the unhelpful words of bad teachers, and the nay-saying ways of the world. The creative adult is in essence simply that, a child. — Ursula K. Le Guin

True voyage is return. — 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

The fact that the Hegnish have absolutely no interest in any people except themselves can also cause offense, or even rage. Foreigners exist. That is all the Hegnish know about them, and all they care to know. They are too polite to say that it is a pity that foreigners exist, but if they had to think about it, they would think so. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The novelist's business is lying. — Ursula K. Le Guin

And not only narrativity but the quality of the writing is of the first importance to me. Rightly or not, I believe a dull, inept style signals poverty or incompleteness of thought. I see the accuracy, scope, and quality of Darwin's intellect directly expressed in the clarity, strength, and vitality of his writing - the beauty of it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. — Ursula K. Le Guin

One keeps oneself neat out of mere decency mere sanity, awareness of other people. And finally even that goes, and one dribbles unashamed. — Ursula K. Le Guin

How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us. — Ursula K. Le Guin

What children don't understand, and can't understand until they grow up some, is how much the whole fabric and process of human society depends on everybody agreeing to ignore, most of the time, the fact that all of us are, most of the time, inadequate, incompetent, pitiful, and, in fact, naked to our enemies. None of us really has very much in the way of spiritual, moral clothing. We dress ourselves in rags. And we agree to say nothing about it. To a very large extent, it is human charity that clothes us. — Ursula K. Le Guin