Top 100 Le Guin Quotes
#1. She always brought something when she came on Fridays, and this time it had been a book. A Wizard of Earthsea, written by someone called Ursula K. Le Guin, and already after the first few pages I knew that this was an absolutely fantastic book.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#2. Many sci-fi authors, we know, are as clever and tricky as so many Coyotes. Ms. Le Guin, though, has matured from the vividness and imagination she had from the beginning into wisdom and a clearsightedness that reaches past sympathy.
Tom Shippey
#3. Ward: Which would you rather have, a National Book Award or a Hugo?
Le Guin: Oh, a Nobel, of course.
Ward: They don't give Nobel Awards in fantasy.
Le Guin: Maybe I can do something for peace.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#4. 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
#5. I never thought I was capable of writing a whole book until Ursula K. Le Guin, with whom I worked briefly in publishing, said, 'you already wrote one (referencing a screenplay), you just need to add the details.
E.L. Sayers
#6. 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
#7. Ursula K. Le Guin urges authors to remember why they do what they do. Her argument is that writing is an form of art rather than a commodity.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#9. The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#11. Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#12. For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#14. Crafty writers ... don't allow Exposition to form Lumps. They break up the information, grind it fine, and make it into bricks to build the story with.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#15. I hope you'll understand that I am not quoting those great words lightly. I do mean it. Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#16. I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#17. But when we crave power over life - endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality - then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#18. I learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence. By
Ursula K. Le Guin
#19. The trouble is, women have to be absolutely first class to get where third-class men get.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#20. The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#21. Anyhow they're always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#22. In innocence there is no strength against evil [ ... ] but there is strength in it for good.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#24. 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
#27. 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
#29. It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#31. A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#32. To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#34. 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
#35. There are times when you have to speak because silence is betrayal.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#37. Do you know how to read?" "No. It is one of the black arts." He nodded. "But a useful one," he said.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#38. '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
#40. Oh Lavinia, Lavinia, you are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#41. I've been looking only at what's to be done next and forgetting why we're doing it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#42. If there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#43. I hate the bigotry you believe in. But I'll try not to hate you."
"Why?" he asked. His voice was cold, as she remembered it.
"Hate eats the hater," she quoted from a familiar text of the Telling.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#44. He saw time turn back upon itself, a river flowing upward to the spring. He held the contemporaneity of two moments in his left and right hands; as he moved them apart he smiled to see the moments separate like dividing soap bubbles.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#45. Wold felt sorry for him, as he often did for young men, who have not seen how passion and plan over and over are wasted, how their lives and acts are wasted between desire and fear.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#46. But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead. In
Ursula K. Le Guin
#47. I tried to speak insipidly, yet everything I said seemed to take on a double meaning.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#48. To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#49. 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
#50. Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#51. A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#53. [...]falcon-winged, falcon-mad, like an unfalling arrow, like an unforgotten thought.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#54. The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#55. Why hadn't she been a detective instead of a goddamn stupid third-class civil rights lawyer? She hated the law. It took an aggressive, assertive personality. She didn't have it. She had a sneaky, sly, shy, squamous personality. She had French diseases of the soul.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#56. Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#57. Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same ... They can be neither separated, nor mixed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#58. And so, because he won't let himself be hurt, he does wrong to those he loves best. And then he sees that, and after all, it hurts him.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Who do you think is lying to us?" Shevek demanded.
Placid, Bedap met his gaze. "Who, brother? Who but ourselves?
Ursula K. Le Guin
#62. I had ignored that black cellar and gone looking for the substance of Orgoreyn aboveground, in daylight. No wonder nothing had seemed real. I
Ursula K. Le Guin
#63. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#64. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#65. He was very weary; the day had been long, and full of dragons.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#66. 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
#67. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#68. The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#69. My dogs have barked at a beggar tonight and he proves a prince of starlight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#70. I felt the pressure of people all around me, all the time. People around me, people with me, people pressing on me, pressing me to be one of them, one of the people.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#71. 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
#72. What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#73. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#74. Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#75. But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#76. 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
#78. The artist who goes into himself most deeply -- and it is a painful journey -- is the artist who touches us most closely, speaks to us most clearly.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#81. 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
#82. Scientific truth will out, you can't hide the sun under a stone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#85. 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
#86. I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer,
Ursula K. Le Guin
#87. So many of his problems were of a kind that other people did not understand, that he got used to working them out for himself, in silence.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#88. 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
#89. [T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#90. Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#91. You see, I don't write the way I was trained to write at the conservatory. I write dysfunctional music.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#92. There were several completely mysterious electrical devices connected with the washstand, and the water valve did not cut off when you released the faucet but kept pouring out until shut off - a sign, Shevek thought, either of great faith in human nature, or of great quantities of hot water.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#95. The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#96. To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#97. To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#98. I didn't know you well at all. Only, when you spoke, I seemed to see clear into you, into the center.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#99. Why must there be war?" "Oh Lavinia, what a woman's question that is! Because men are men.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#100. But I, who am old, who have done what I must do, who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know that there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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