Ursula K. Le Guin

Quotes

• “When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trou...”
• “I want to say to the literature teacher who remains wilfully, even boastfully ignorant of a major element of contemporar...”
• “Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each ot...”
• “In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading,...”
• “...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not ...”
• “Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to c...”
• “The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. ...”
• “If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elem...”
• “The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show th...”
• “This was a great magic. Festin had no more performed it than has any man who in exile or danger longs for the earth and ...”
• “We live well in the houses, well enough, but we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between t...”
• “There was something lacking – in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not strong enough to tak...”
• “An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap-works. Par...”
• “I never thought before,” said Tirin unruffled, “of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras,...”
• “On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the th...”
• “Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misse...”
• “And not only narrativity but the quality of the writing is of the first importance to me. Rightly or not, I believe a du...”
• “The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does...”
• “Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more ...”
• “She could not have been born gray. Hercolor, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her ange...”
• “They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place ev...”
• “They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into thedarkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place eve...”
• “But if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of ...”
• “Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, ...”
• “A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes n...”
• “Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but afte...”
• “Through him speaks a shrewd and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom a profound, old, te...”
• “To the Bullock RoserootWhat's the thought you thinkall your life long?It must be a great one,a solemn one, to make you g...”
• “A lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their children enjoyed my b...”
• “Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singu...”
• “Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can...”
• “We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obl...”
• “The creative adult is the child who survived after the world tried killing them, making them grown up. The creative adul...”
• “Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the table...”
• “Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleas...”
• “This concern, feebly called 'love of nature', seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, ...”
• “Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. ...”
• “Am I supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After all, he's just a man ... He's about fifty years old...”
• “With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents...”
• “A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put ...”
• “Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other--outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use...”
• “The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. Th...”
• “He looked at me. His firm, broad face showed weight-loss in deep shadows under the cheekbones, his eyes were sunken and ...”
• “I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed ...”
• “I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don’t have to learn.”Vokep shook his head grimly. “It’s the kid...”
• “If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?...I me...”
• “War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatev...”
• “My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there wa...”
• “«I am tired,» he said. «I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button...”
• “And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearnin...”