Top 100 Guin's Quotes
#1. Le Guin's Rule: One person cannot do two fulltime jobs, but two persons can do three fulltime jobs - if they honestly share the work.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#2. Lord of the Rings is a good thing for us because it opened the door for the genre in general. Le Guin's stories are very different from Lord of the Rings.
Shawn Ashmore
#4. What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#6. There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#9. You can't change anything from the outside in. Standing apart, looking down, talking the overview, you see pattern. What's wrong, what's missing. You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#10. '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
#11. I've been looking only at what's to be done next and forgetting why we're doing it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#12. In diversity is life and where there's life there's hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#13. Laws are made against the impulse a people most fears in itself. Do not kill was the Shing's vaunted single Law. All else was permitted: which meant, perhaps, there was little else they really wanted to do ...
Ursula K. Le Guin
#14. Why must there be war?" "Oh Lavinia, what a woman's question that is! Because men are men.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#15. Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman's power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#16. 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
#18. There's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#19. 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
#20. There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#21. A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer's job is to be its medium.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#22. 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
#23. I forgot, being too interested myself, that he's a king, and does not see things rationally, but as a king. All I've told him means to him simply that his power is threatened, his kingdom is a dust mote in space, his kingship is a joke to men who rule a hundred worlds.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#26. For heroes do not make history - that is the historian's job - but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#27. I'm old to be raising a child. And she ... She obeys me, but only because she wants to."
"It's the only justification for obedience," Ged observed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#28. Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#29. You know there's always prejudice in a revolutionary movement.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#30. Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#31. 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
#33. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?
Ursula K. Le Guin
#34. To go under a river: there's a strange thing to do, a really weird idea.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#35. George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#36. If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin
the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#37. To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game ... speak the truth and hear the truth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#38. There's another option. You can consider the reader, not as a helpless victim or a passive consumer, but as an active, intelligent, worthy collaborator. A colluder, a coillusionist.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#39. 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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#40. 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
#41. If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#42. So rest a while, we can talk in the cool of the evening. Or the cool of the morning. There 's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.
-Hawk
Who had been Archmage
The Other Wind
Ursula K. Le Guin
#43. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#44. To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It's worth it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#45. Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#47. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#48. Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism , Christianity , and Islam , and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism . For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#50. To him a thinking man's job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#51. A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#52. Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#53. What's wrong with pleasure, Takver? why don't you want it?"
"Nothing's wrong with it. And I do want it. Only I don't need it. And if I take what I don't need, I'll never get to what I do need.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#55. Lord Berosty rem ir Ipe came to Thangering Fastness and offered forty beryls and half the year's yield from his orchards as the price of a Foretelling, and the price was acceptable. He set his question to the Weaver Odren, and the question was, On what day shall I die?
Ursula K. Le Guin
#56. 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
#57. Contrast J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. The author adopts the childish view of adults as inhumanly powerful and uncomprehending, and never goes beyond it; and so his novel, published for adults, is better appreciated by ten-year-olds. The
Ursula K. Le Guin
#58. Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#59. My Real Children starts quietly, then suddenly takes you on two roller-coaster rides at once, swooping dizzily through a double panorama and ending in a sort of super Sophie's Choice. A daring tour de force.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#60. Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#61. Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name's the mother
of the ten thousand things.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#63. 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
#64. 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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#66. The art of one's own time tends to be formidable ... because we have to learn how and where to take hold of it, what response is being asked of us, before we can get involved. It's truly new, and therefore truly a bit frightening.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#67. 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
#68. We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God's truth, the universe at once began to exist.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#69. Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it; it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#70. They made love. Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other's arms, holding love, asleep.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#71. When we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#72. Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#73. If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#74. 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
#76. There's no right answer
to the wrong question.
Now what do we do?
Ursula K. Le Guin
#77. What is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry?
Ursula K. Le Guin
#78. What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#79. 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?
Ursula K. Le Guin
#80. I suppose the Valley of the Na, in Always Coming Home, is where I think I'd most like to live; but that's partly because I did live there, all the summers of my childhood.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#81. The strength of Shevek's personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#82. Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#83. I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?
Ursula K. Le Guin
#84. In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#85. The Encyclopedia Planaria, in forty-four volumes, is not portable, and after all, what is entirely reliable unless it's dead?
Ursula K. Le Guin
#86. I did not deliberately invent Earthsea, I did not think 'Hey wow - islands are archetypes and archipelagoes are superarchetypes and let's build us an archipelago! I am not an engineer, but an explorer. I discovered Earthsea.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#87. 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
#88. I never know the heron as it flies at first. What is the slow, wide-winged figure in the sky? Then I see it, like a word in a foreign language, like seeing one's own name written in a strange alphabet and recognizing it, I say it: the heron.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#91. If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives ... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#92. 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
#93. Desar's chosen field in mathematics was so esoteric that nobody in the Institute or the Math Federation could really check on his progress. That was precisely why he had chosen it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#94. Sure, it's simple writing for kids ... just as simple as bringing them up.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#95. It was men's ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#96. It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#98. Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#99. It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it's an easy name to call another man.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#100. The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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