Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Not even need and love can defeat fate...

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. —Chuang Tse: XXIII

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

What is evil? asked the younger man. The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them both. A web we men weave. Ged answered.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

They are of the dream time. I don't understand it, I can't say it in words. Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes. . . .But when the mind becomes conscious, when the rate of evolution speeds up, then you have to be careful. Careful of the world. You must learn the way. You must learn the skills, the art, the limits. A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully--as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously. Do you see? Does it mean anything to you?

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Fish and visitors stink after three days.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite—sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm, that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game...speak the truth and hear the truth.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Was he leaving home, or going home?

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things, there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them, too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there are seeds to be gathered and room in the bag of stars.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

BucketI feel so dreamydreamy lazy, crazy sleepylike I want to be therein the doorway, the doorwayor the porch cornerbe sitting, be emptynotdoing not goingan old bucket left therein the porch corner is like I aman old empty bucket somebody left there.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

To the Bullock RoserootWhat's the thought you thinkall your life long?It must be a great one,a solemn one, to make you gazethrough the world at it,all your life long.When you have to look aside from ityour eyes roll, you bellowin anger, anxiousto return to it, steadilyto gaze at it, think itall your life long.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Through him speaks a shrewd and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom a profound, old, terrible, and unimaginably various experience of life. But he himself is young: impatient, inexperienced. He stands higher than we stand, seeing wider, but he is himself only the height of a man.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name’s the motherof the ten thousand things.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

At the pit's bottom is no anger.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom...

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

But if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of the job to be done and one's ability to do it, then you might say the chief virtue of excellent artists is their modesty...But knowing your limits and going to them isn't arrogance. It's greatness of spirit.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

They let us be, here, in the cage of our ignorance.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The unknown...the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought...The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I think we shall have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round and round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He seemed not to know the uses of silence.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government in earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin