Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The sleeper turns his back on everyone.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Orr slept. He dreamed. There was no rub.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Cinders patter, falling with the snow. We creep infinitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself. Praise then Creation unfinished!

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house? The tale tells how the Lords of Manva hunted & gathered roots & cooked their suppers while they were camped in exile in the foothills of Sul, but it doesn't say what their wives & children were living on in their city left ruined & desolate by the enemy. They were finding food too, somehow, cleaning house & honoring the gods, the way we did in the siege & under the tyranny of the Alds. When the heroes came back from the mountain, they were welcomed with a feast. I'd like to know what the food was and how the women managed it.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

A people that doesn't live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and storytellers, is in a bad way. The center of the world is where you live fully, where you know how things are done, how things are done rightly, done well.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

. . . chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don't see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can't make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing but does only and wholly what he must do.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work -- his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy -- and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the 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. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

o. It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren’t beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can’t always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn’t enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free—possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren’t beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can’t always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn’t enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free—possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are.

~ 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

The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society formed upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You know there’s always prejudice in a revolutionary movement.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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. We can't stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair…Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

But she knew, though very vaguely, that she was crying, because hope hurts terribly when it breaks through the resignation in which you have lived for days.

~ 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

The premise is: everybody's like me and we all think alike.The corollary is: people who don't think like me don't matter.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

They can send death at once, but life is slower...

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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 write.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The strength of Shevek's personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like -- what’s going on -- what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming another third of it spent in telling lies. [Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness]

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

This StoneHe went looking for a roadthat doesn't lead to death.He went looking for that roadand found it.It was a stone road.He walked that roadthat doesn't lead to death.He walked on it awhilebefore he stopped,having turned to stone.Now he stands there on that roadthat doesn't lead to deathnot going anywhere.He can't dance.from his eyes stones fall.The rainbow people pass himcrossing that road, long-legged, light-stepping,going from the Four Housesto the dancing in the Five Houses.They pick up his tears.This stone is a tearfrom his eye, this stonegiven me on the mountainby one who died before my birth,this stone, this stone.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

She could not have been born gray. Hercolor, 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 mixednature, 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

... there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.

~ 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

I want to say to the literature teacher who remains wilfully, even boastfully ignorant of a major element of contemporary fiction: you are incompetent to teach or judge your subject. Readers and students who do know the field, meanwhile, have every right to challenge your ignorant prejudice. Rise, undergraduates of the English departments! You have nothing to lose but your A on the midterm!

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents to drink and be clean and irrigate with, using water mindfully, carefully. They lived in a land that answers greed with drought and death. A difficult land: aloof yet sensitive.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin