Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it wa...

And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. O...

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to ...

Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of m...

There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power. Y...

We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. R...

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there...

They are of the dream time. I don't understand it, I can't say it in words. Everything dreams. The p...

But the human being likes to be challenged, seeks freedom in adversity.

Independence was as far as his mind could reach. Yet I think his mind groped further, towards what h...

The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and...

The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma.

You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth?

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that di...

Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed e...

a book is a box of words until you open it.

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns...

I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to pre...

Up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society...

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a...

In this he saw that Ogion had been right: the shadow could not draw on his power, so long as he was ...

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, th...

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

Through him speaks a shrewd and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom...

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.

Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to d...

A lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their c...

Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.

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

If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but...

Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment...

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

Age and illness made one a dualist

It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All...

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of real...

I thought the same thing, exactly. We always say that. you said it--you should have refused to go to...

I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I wr...

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work —...

Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, ...

You always have to defend the imagination against idiots.

Love doesn't just sit there like a stone it has to be made like bread remade all the time made ...

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.

The sleeper turns his back on everyone.

He knew that he was very near achieving the General Temporal Theory that the Ioti wanted so badly fo...

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and...

Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long tim...

What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you...

I write with all my heart

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

The nod of a head is such a small thing, it can mean so little, yet it is the gesture of assent that...

As we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not...

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

But you're so strong. I wish I were strong. I just like eating.

All that grieved me - that I was half one thing and half another and nothing wholly - was the sorrow...

Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes you know it. You know it as the truth...

Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgot...

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns ...

There is no break in the wholeness of time.

Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the l...

They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths ...

You shall not go down good twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed ...

An Odonian’s goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning ...

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But on...

I'm afraid of life! There are times I--I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I...

His eyes saved him. What they insisted on seeing and reporting to him took him out of the autism of ...

Power inheres in a center. You're going to the center.

There was something lacking – in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not ...

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

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead king...

I never thought before,” said Tirin unruffled, “of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill,...

Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.

To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.

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

I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don’t have to learn.”Vokep shook his head g...

They praised his modesty and did not listen to him, for listening is a rare gift, and men will have ...

Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. {...} But each deed you do, eac...

For discipline is the channel in which our acts run strong and deep; where there is no direction, th...

Stealthily the stars slid forward into nothingness.

If the rowan's roots are shallow, it bears no crown.

Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your min...

When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at th...

What is evil?" asked the younger man. The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them bot...

I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps.

A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, b...

The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth an light, all that these do, and all that the beas...

There must be darkness to see the stars.

No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very...

And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet I would remember that once I saw the...

We men dream dreams, we work magic, we do good, we do evil. The dragons do not dream. They are dream...

Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still th...

She'll die.' 'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.

I am tired of safe places, and roofs, and walls around me.

Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, ...

You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the ma...

Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they g...

And I did nothing, nothing but try to hide from the horror of dying." He stopped, for saying the tru...

He said after a little while, 'I see why you say that only men do evil, I think. Even sharks are inn...