Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.
As a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing,but does only and wholly what he must do.
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.
If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else.
The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel.
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.
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.
A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.
If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.
There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.
Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison.
I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.
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.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
In innocence there is no strength against evil, said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. But there is strength in it for good.
Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
If your voice is heard by more people because you've earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.
This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. "If it is not, what is?" He could not endure those remembered words.
What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing.
To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.
Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.
We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.
We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.
I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
