Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

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.

No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.

To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.

No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.

The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!

... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.

If they come prying they can leave curious.

It always seemed to me they're sort of alike ... magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.

Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.

Where there's property, there's theft.

It is not human to be without shame and without desire.

The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.

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.

Do you know how to read?" "No. It is one of the black arts." He nodded. "But a useful one," he said.

I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

By and large books are mankind's best invention.

She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

Men who fight wars in winter don't live till spring.

It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.

Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger.

All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.

Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else

Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.

The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.

The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.

In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.

Infinite are the arguments of mages.

The machine conceals the machinations.

...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.

Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.

There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.

Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.

There's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.

It was men's ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.

There's no way to use power for good.

I've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.

Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.

Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I'm sorry. When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.

Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

Greed puts out the sun.

Manipulated, one manipulates others.