Ursula K. Le Guin quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin on Wise Famous Quotes.

Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?

He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.

To deny the past is to deny the future.

Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.

What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.

Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.

It was the idea of writing with a specific audience in mind or a specific age of reader that scared me off.

Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.

Fact is one of our finest fictions.

A man gives out, dearie. A woman takes in.

The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.

..he says, but that's wizard's talk, making things seem great by great words.

Freedom is never very safe.

A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither.

It's a queer business, making oneself blind.

Students are intense people, they laugh and cry, they break down and rebuild.

Privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom.

As he came to the bank Ogion, waiting, reached out his hand and clasping the boy's arm whispered to him his true name: Ged.

We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.

To him a thinking man's job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect.

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

Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.

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

His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate.

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

He, after all, had no standards of manliness, of virility, to complicate his pride.

Time is not duration but intensity; time is the beat and the interval [ ... ]

We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.

Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison.

That is between me and my shadow.

proud men and umbrageous men, casting black shadows.

Hector had no virtue?" "Of course he did. He won all his battles, till the last one." "We all do," Aeneas remarked.

Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.

All makers must leave room for acts of the spirit.

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

The novelist's business is lying.

Manipulated, one manipulates others.

To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

You must be Arha, or you must be Tenar. You cannot be both.

Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.

Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

I lied. I lied. I lied. I lied deliberately, knowingly, well. She lied. She is a liar. She is an intellectual too! She is a lie. And a coward, afraid.

Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?

Most bigots are sincere.

I never had a gift but one, to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act.

As a writer, you are free.

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.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

What a comfort the past is," Mimen said, "when the future offers none.

One man may as easily destroy, as govern: be King or Anti-King.

No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

One must work with time and not against it.

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human. We

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.

My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war.

Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.

Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.

It is a great deal to ask of a kitten, to defend a man against the armies of the dead.

THE DOMESTICATION OF HUNCH

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

Facts are no more slid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. Bot both are sensitive.

In war everybody is a prisoner.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

Sure, it's simple writing for kids ... just as simple as bringing them up.

If you play against your own side you'll lose the whole game.

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.

Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.

One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.

But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.

There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.

When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.

Self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with printed matter seems misplaced.

The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.

Greed puts out the sun.

I think one cannot be left alive among so many deaths without feeling unendurable shame.

How did you get all this?" "Stole it," said the one-time prime minister of Karhide,

Consistency is a virtue until it gets annoying.

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

Estraven asleep looked a little stupid, like everyone asleep.

Infinite are the arguments of mages,

[T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.

his heart going hard.

I didn't know you well at all. Only, when you spoke, I seemed to see clear into you, into the center.

One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies ...

We weren't cruel, we were ignorant, foolish. Children are ignorant and foolish. But they learn. If they are given a chance to learn.

Was he leaving home, or going home?

His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.