Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

There must be darkness to see the stars.

I am tired of safe places, and roofs, and walls around me.

Not even need and love can defeat fate...

What is evil?" asked the younger man. The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them both. "A web we men weave." Ged answered.

In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.

Fish and visitors stink after three days.

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.

To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game...speak the truth and hear the truth.

Was he leaving home, or going home?

He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.

If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even.

On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate.

A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras.

They let us be, here, in the cage of our ignorance.

Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd.

[T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.

I think we shall have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round and round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either.

He seemed not to know the uses of silence.

A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government in earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.

But the human being likes to be challenged, seeks freedom in adversity.

a book is a box of words until you open it.

It's a queer business, making oneself blind.

Judgement is poverty.

Pride kept her from confiding in the other girls, and caution kept her from confessing to the older women.

He, after all, had no standards of manliness, of virility, to complicate his pride.

Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it.

With eye and hand and breath and will.

The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.

It takes a while to spoil a world, but it can be done.

His eyes saved him. What they insisted on seeing and reporting to him took him out of the autism of terror.

The sleeper turns his back on everyone.

Orr slept. He dreamed. There was no rub.

Cinders patter, falling with the snow. We creep infinitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself. Praise then Creation unfinished!

What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice

The truth is that 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.

You know there’s always prejudice in a revolutionary movement.

Up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society, and its rules, as he from his.

But she knew, though very vaguely, that she was crying, because hope hurts terribly when it breaks through the resignation in which you have lived for days.

The premise is: everybody's like me and we all think alike.The corollary is: people who don't think like me don't matter.

They can send death at once, but life is slower...

I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write.

Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.

The strength of Shevek's personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable.

... there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.

Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing

Dragons think we are amusing. But they remember Erreth-Akbe. They speak of him as if he were a dragon, not a man.

I never knew anybody, anywhere I have been, who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth, from orbit.

Independence was as far as his mind could reach. Yet I think his mind groped further, towards what he could not see, the body's obscure, inalterable dream of mutuality.

You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth?

The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I supposed?