Top 100 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
#3. 'Banished men should never speak their native tongue; it comes bitter from their mouth. And this language suits a traitor better, I think; drips off one's teeth like sugar-syrup.'
Ursula K. Le Guin
#4. I've been looking only at what's to be done next and forgetting why we're doing it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#5. All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#6. [...]falcon-winged, falcon-mad, like an unfalling arrow, like an unforgotten thought.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#7. You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?" "No - " "To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question." I
Ursula K. Le Guin
#8. Kids could and did swim in it happily as in their native element, at least until some teacher or professor told them they had to come out, dry off, and breathe modernism ever after.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#9. Everything is old, here. We are old - the Masters."
"You're not," Irian said. She thought him between thirty and forty[ ... ]
"But I came far. Miles can be years.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#10. To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#11. [T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#12. You see, I don't write the way I was trained to write at the conservatory. I write dysfunctional music.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#14. We demand a rebellious spirit of those who have no chance to learn that rebellion is possible, but we the privileged hold still and see no evil.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#15. It was not in Raj Lyubov's nature to think, "What can I do?" Character and training disposed him not to interfere in other men's business. His job was to find out what they did, and his inclination was to let them go on doing it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#16. 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
#17. A wizard's power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow ...
Ursula K. Le Guin
#18. Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#20. For to keep dark the mind of the mageborn, that is a dangerous thing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#21. A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#23. It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#24. she had never known who she was at all, except sometimes for a moment in meditation, when her I am became It is, and she breathed the stars
Ursula K. Le Guin
#25. To go under a river: there's a strange thing to do, a really weird idea.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#27. Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other
outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#28. George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#29. The sure, quick, and lasting way to make people into a nation: war. His
Ursula K. Le Guin
#30. It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#31. Pride kept her from confiding in the other girls, and caution kept her from confessing to the older women.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#32. There are a limited number of plots (some say seven, some say twelve, some say thirty). There is no limit to the number of stories.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#33. You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#34. Having replaced instinct with language, society, and culture, we are the only species that depends on teaching and learning. We aren't human without them. In them is true power. But are they the occupations of the rich and mighty?
Ursula K. Le Guin
#35. The Old Powers of earth are not for men to use. They were never given into our hands, and in our hands they work only ruin. Ill means, ill end. I was not drawn here, but driven here, and the force that drove me works to my undoing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#36. We're a rough people, born of oak, as they say, here in the western land; tempers run high, weapons are always at hand.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#37. Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#38. What will the creature made all of sea-drift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking? His
Ursula K. Le Guin
#40. Here you think the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there's no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. people like to do things. They like to do them well.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#41. That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#42. 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
#44. Then Ged pitied her. She was like a white deer caged, like a white bird wing-clipped, like a silver ring in an old man's finger.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#45. It is the nature of the idea to be communicated, written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass it craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows stronger from being stepped on.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#46. When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#47. It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#48. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#49. Offering
I made a poem going
to sleep last night, woke
in sunlight, it was clean forgotten.
If it was any good, gods
of the great darkness
where sleep goes and farther
death goes, you not named,
then as true offering
accept it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#51. 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
#53. Had his fear, in fact, been the personal fear that Selver might having learnt the racial hatred, reject him and treat him not as you but as one of them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#54. She had made these with scrap wire and tools from the craft supply depot, and called them Occupations of Uninhabited Space.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#55. To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don't realize that. And you can't write unless you read.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#56. 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
#59. I never had a gift but one, to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#60. There's no right answer
to the wrong question.
Now what do we do?
Ursula K. Le Guin
#65. But you're not a traitor, you've merely been the tool of one. I don't punish tools. They do harm only in the hands of a bad workman.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#66. Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#67. Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#68. It is what it looks like and is called. A jail. it is not a front for something else, not a facade, not a pseudonym. It is real, the real thing, the thing behind the words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#69. When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#70. Ours is only a little power, seems like, next to theirs," Moss said. "But it goes down deep. It's all roots. It's like an old blackberry thicket. And a wizard's power's like a fir tree, maybe, great and tall and grand, but it'll blow right down in a storm. Nothing kills a blackberry bramble.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#71. He had made follow him. He had called her by her name, and she had come crouching to his hand.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#72. I think if you have lost a great happiness and try to recall it, you are only asking for sorrow, but if you do not try to dwell on the happiness, sometimes you find it dwelling in your heart and body, silent but sustaining.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#73. In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#75. 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
#76. To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#77. I don't know which I should fear more ... death or life. I wish I could be done with fear.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#78. Wasn't it immoral to do work you didn't enjoy? The work needed doing but a lot of people didn't care what they were posted to and changed jobs all the time; they should have volunteered. Any fool could do this work.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#79. The life of every man is in the Center of Time, for all were seen in the seeing of Meshe, and are in his eye. We are the pupils of his Eye ... Our doing is his Seeing: our being is his Knowing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#80. Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#81. Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#82. Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#83. I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#84. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after "semicolons," and another one after "now." And
Ursula K. Le Guin
#85. You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#86. His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#87. Where will you sleep?" he inquired, sitting down heavily on the bed. "No where," the Alien replied, its toneless voice dividing the word into two equally significant wholes.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#88. 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
#89. Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life ...
Ursula K. Le Guin
#92. The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#93. 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
#94. We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#95. One man may as easily destroy, as govern: be King or Anti-King.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#96. I had of course met with incredulity..., but seldom with a will to incredulity.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#97. Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#98. 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
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