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Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

All Quotes Acceptance Age Aliens Ambition Art Balance Belief Betrayal Capitalism Character Children Choices Communication Consciousness Country Darkness Desire Earth Empathy Equality Evil Evolution Fate Feelings Freedom Funny Giving Grieving Growing Up Happiness Hate Hatred Healing Heart Hell Home House Humility Imagination Injustice Insanity Inspirational Journey Joy Language Life Life And Death Literature Lying Moon Morality Myth Pain Peace Perception Progress Reading Reality Responsibility Revolution Running Sanity Science Science Fiction Silence Sleep Solitude Soul Spring Suffering Technology Time Understanding Violence Virtue Waiting Wall War Wilderness Winning Writing
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Art, Kings, Divine Right
Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a WriterÕs Week”, p.115, Small Beer Press

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Creativity, Imagination
Ursula K. Le Guin (2017). “No Time to Spare: Thinking about what Matters”, p.120, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Change is freedom, change is life. It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed. There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Wall, Nice, Thinking

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Dragons, People, Deny
Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, p.211, Shambhala Publications

No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Stars, Forever, Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Farthest Shore”, p.200, Simon and Schuster

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Mindfulness, Revolution, Spirit
Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “The Dispossessed”, p.130, Hachette UK

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

Ursula K. Le Guin
Life, Business, Future
The Left Hand of Darkness ch. 5 (1969)

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Inspirational, Real, Book
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.31, Ultramarine Publishing

Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Odds, Two, Limits

Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Injustice, Break
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “Tales from Earthsea”, p.263, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Art, Writing, Mean
"A Few Words to a Young Writer" by Ursula K. Le Guin, www.ursulakleguin.com. 2008.

To hear, one must be silent.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Silent
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “A Wizard of Earthsea”, p.202, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Wind Blowing, Matter, Fields
"The Lathe of Heaven". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971.

The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .

Ursula K. Le Guin
Wall, Acceptance, Way
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.227, Ultramarine Publishing

The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Light, Balance, Shadow

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself - as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation - you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Spiritual, Respect, Hate
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.99, Ultramarine Publishing

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Being Yourself, Matter, Asking Yourself Questions
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.200, Ultramarine Publishing

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Long
Ursula K. Le Guin (2001). “Tales from Earthsea”, p.310, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Freedom, Hero, Adventure
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.87, Ultramarine Publishing

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Book, Soul, Feelings

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

Ursula K. Le Guin
Funny, Depression, Crazy
Ursula K. Le Guin (2008). “The Lathe Of Heaven: A Novel”, p.44, Simon and Schuster

Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Music, Thinking, Way
Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “Very Far Away from Anywhere Else”, p.52, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Country, Women, Civilization
Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.163, Grove Press

To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Stories, May, Helping
Ursula K. Le Guin (2006). “Gifts”, p.25, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Love, Life, Relationship
The Lathe of Heaven ch. 10 (1971)

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