Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we have is here, now.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

And I did nothing, nothing but try to hide from the horror of dying. He stopped, for saying the truth aloud was unendurable. It was not shame that stopped him, but fear, the same fear. He knew now why this tranquil life in sea and sunlight on the rafts seemed to him like an after-life or a dream, unreal. It was because he knew in his heart that reality was empty: without life or warmth or color or sound: without meaning. There were no heights or depths. All this lovely play of form and light and color on the sea and in the eyes of men, was no more than that, a playing of illusions on the shallow void.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light. They could not hide you.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

...You have knowledge, and I have skill, and between us we have...We have the Ring of Erreth-Akbe.Yes, that. But I thought also of another thing between us. Call it trust... That is one of its names. It is a very great thing. Though each of us alone is weak, having that we are strong, stronger than the Powers of the Dark.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don’t have to learn.”Vokep shook his head grimly. “It’s the kids,” he said. “Having babies. Makes ’em propertarians. They won’t let go.” He sighed. “Touch and go, brother, that’s the rule. Don’t ever let yourself be owned.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

COME HOME, TENAR! COME HOME!”In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face toward home. The mother waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind her, watched the tiny figure running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass beneath the trees.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

All that grieved me - that I was half one thing and half another and nothing wholly - was the sorrow of my childhood, but the strength and use of my life after I grew up.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I went on through the Sinoth Valley, through the evening of his death, into the cold country that lies beyond fear. There I found you can weep all you like, but there's no good in it.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.

~ 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

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You always have to defend the imagination against idiots.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird feeder.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?...I mean, men give her [a queen] power. They let her use their power. But it isn't hers, is it? It isn't because she's a woman that she's powerful, but despite it.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Can you walk the road your dream goes?Sometimes. Sometimes I am afraid to.Who is not....

~ 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

No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

For the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest.

~ 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

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.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

...All who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You lost death, you lost life, in order to save yourself. Yourself! Your immortal self! What is it? Who are you?I am myself. My body will not decay and die-A living body suffers pain, Cob; a living body grows old; it dies. Death is the price we pay for our life and for all life.I do not pay it! I can die and in that moment live again! I cannot be killed; I am immortal. I alone am myself forever!Who are you, then?The Immortal One.Say your name.The King.Say my name. I told it to you but a minute since. Say my name!You are not real. You have no name. Only I exist.You exist: without name, without form. You cannot see the light of day; you cannot see the dark. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no self. All that which you sold, that is yourself. You have given everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw your world to you, all that light and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be filled. Not all the songs of earth, not all the stars of heaven, could fill your emptiness.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

An Odonian’s goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

In the latter months of his own long sickness the Master Herbal had taught him much of the healer's lore, and the first lesson and the last of all that lore was this: Heal the wound and cure the illness, but let the dying spirit go.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

There must be darkness to see the stars.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

All her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won't talk about anything except the injustice of the United States income tax structure toward people with fluctuating income, or how to breed Black Angus cows, or something.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin