Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself

The great authors share their souls with us- "literally.

Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.

There is no kingdom like the forests.

Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.

Scientific truth will out, you can't hide the sun under a stone.

Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.

What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up

It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.

Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.

Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.

But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.

Little mirrors were attached to the front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been; then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of Progress.

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!

He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.

Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.

A man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.

How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught?

Statesmen remember things selectively.

Progress means nothing to presence.

It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.

It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it's an easy name to call another man.

Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.

One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.

Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.

Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?

The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.

I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.

All makers must leave room for acts of the spirit.

Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.

Even a poet cannot get everything right.

If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself.

Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.

We sleep researchers like cats, you know; they sleep a lot!

Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone.

The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.

You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.

When I'm writing I don't dream much; it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing.

Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.

There are dance artists, painting artists and writing artists. Authors are writing artists. You can practice art in whatever medium you choose, and words are mine.

Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name’s the motherof the ten thousand things.