Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to get away to?Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane stove, five aluminum folding chairs, and a transistor radio on the inside. They arrive totally encapsulated in a secondhand reality. And then they move on to Yellowstone, and it's just the same there, all trailers and transistors. They go from park to park, but they never really go anywhere; except when one of them who thinks that even the wildlife isn't real gets chewed up by a genuine, firsthand bear.The same sort of thing seems to be happening to Elfland, lately.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

What is fantasy? On one level, of course, it is a game: a pure pretense with no ulterior motive whatever. It is one child saying to another child, “Let’s be dragons,” and then they’re dragons for an hour or two. It is escapism of the most admirable kind—the game played for the game’s sake. On another level, it is still a game, but a game played for very high stakes. Seen thus, as art, not spontaneous play, its affinity is not with daydream, but with dream. It is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational but pararational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary, not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes, which, Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. And their guides, the writers of fantasy, should take their responsibilities seriously.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

One of the rocks in my soulbag, a little grey rock that I had picked up on a certain day in a certain place in the hills above the river in the Silver Time, a little piece of my world, that became my world. |Every night I took it out and held it in my hand while I lay in bed waiting to sleep, thinking of the sunlight on the hills above the river, listening to the soft shushing of the ship’s systems, like a mechanical sea

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is he'll be much godlier after he's dead.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Am I supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After all, he's just a man ... He's about fifty years old, and he's bald. And I'll bet he has to cut his toenails too like any other man. I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is, he'll be much godlier after he's dead.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

A lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their children enjoyed my books but of course they never read them, and people who make sure I know they don’t read that space-ship stuff. No, no, they read Literature—realism. Like The Help, or Fifty Shades of Grey.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Under his feet he felt the hillroots going down and down into the dark, and over his head he saw the dry, far fires of the stars. Between, all things were his to order, to command. He stood at the center of the world.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I fear liars, and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country well. Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts long enough.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes. And where men worship these things and abase themselves before them, there evil breeds; there places are made in the world where darkness gathers, places given over wholly to the Ones whom we call Nameless, the ancient and holy Powers of the Earth before the Light, the powers of the dark, of ruin, of madness.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. 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, and very often in our art, the art of words.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

We're not outside the world... We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is their in our world?

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He copulated with a number of girls, but copulation was not the joy it ought to be. It was a mere relief of need, like evacuating, and he felt ashamed of it afterward because it involved another person as object.

~ 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

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

Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I suspect that the distinction between a maternal and a paternal instinct is scarcely worth making; the parental instinct, the wish to protect, to further, is not a sex-linked characteristic…

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren’t about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The king was pregnant.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of its existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering - unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his cellular function. the analogic term for the individual's individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength. That was a central idea of Odo's Analogy. That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; just the contrary. With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and the individual became clear. Sacrifice mught be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice -- the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?'...'Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin