Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

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

People need God the way a three-year-old needs a chainsaw.

Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive

For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.

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.

Sure, it's simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.

To light a candle is to cast a shadow...

There is no break in the wholeness of time.

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.

Why is it that if you say you don’t enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren’t going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as “loathing�

But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord.""It might to keep it open.

I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps.

I was with you at the beginning of your journey. It is right that I should follow you to its end.

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

Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that recognition of each person's solitude which alone transcends it.

The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.

If women had power what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?

Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men.

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.

Stealthily the stars slid forward into nothingness.

The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.

Odo said it all her life. 'Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice!

So rest a while, we can talk in the cool of the evening. Or the cool of the morning. There 's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was." -HawkWho had been ArchmageThe Other Wind

In this he saw that Ogion had been right: the shadow could not draw on his power, so long as he was turned against it.

I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is he'll be much godlier after he's dead.

Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?

Power inheres in a center. You're going to the center.

I fear liars, and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country well. Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts long enough.

We're not outside the world... We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is their in our world?

You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.

But you're so strong. I wish I were strong. I just like eating.

Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?'...'Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels.

If the rowan's roots are shallow, it bears no crown.

What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we have is here, now.

Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.

There's a saying, " Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly.

Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.

As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage.

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, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.

All that grieved me - that I was half one thing and half another and nothing wholly - was the sorrow of my childhood, but the strength and use of my life after I grew up.

It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.

Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma.

You always have to defend the imagination against idiots.

Can you walk the road your dream goes?Sometimes. Sometimes I am afraid to.Who is not....

Oh, Hank, " Susan whispered, "their wings are furry.""Oh, James, " Harriet whispered, "their hands are kind.

For the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest.

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.