Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

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.

Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words.

When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor.

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

She obeys me, but only because she wants to. It's the only justification for obedience, Ged observed.

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.

The light is the left hand of darkness.

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

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.

Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.

To hear, one must be silent.

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.

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.

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.

All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.

Paradise is for those who make paradise.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

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.

We read books to find out who we are.

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

Owning is owing, having is hoarding.

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.

And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.

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.

Besides, when you say you're a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it's kind of irresistible.

I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.

But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.

The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?

It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow.

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.