Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed Quotes
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.
There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.
Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.
The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I supposed?
The strength of Shevek's personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable.
His eyes saved him. What they insisted on seeing and reporting to him took him out of the autism of terror.
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.
Odo said it all her life. 'Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice!
You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that recognition of each person's solitude which alone transcends it.
They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned.
