Authors:

Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes - Page 18

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

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

Ursula K. Le Guin
Light, Years, Looks
Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Telling”, p.41, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Anarchist, Forgotten, Century
Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “The Dispossessed”, p.151, Hachette UK

Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Kings, Belief, Nationalism
Ursula K. Le Guin (2008). “Voices”, p.154, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.

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

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

Ursula K. Le Guin
Art, Writing, Practice

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.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Islands, Sea, Storm
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “A Wizard of Earthsea”, p.1, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

All makers must leave room for acts of the spirit.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Rooms, Spirit, Makers

The wise needn't ask, the fool asks in vain.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Wise, Fool, Vain

My Real Children starts quietly, then suddenly takes you on two roller-coaster rides at once, swooping dizzily through a double panorama and ending in a sort of super Sophie's Choice. A daring tour de force.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Real, Two

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing, Fiction, Preacher
"Ursula K. Le Guin: Still Battling the Powers That Be". Wired interview, www.wired.com. July 25, 2012.

When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up

Ursula K. Le Guin
Upset, Students, Anarchist

...fiction is made out of the writer's experience, his whole life from infancy on, everything he's thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn't something you go and get - it's a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that "experience"; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing.

Ursula K. Le Guin
War, Adventure, Moon

Those who dislike fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled by science. They don't like either hobbits, or quasars; they don't feel at home with them; they don't want complexities, remoteness. If there is any such connection, I'll bet that it is basically an aesthetic one

Ursula K. Le Guin
Home, Bored, Connections
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.26, Ultramarine Publishing

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

Ursula K. Le Guin
Groups, Common, Sinister
Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.124, Grove Press

Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the love of nature" seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Cutting, Rocks, Hands

You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, "Am I popular?" I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Book, School, Thinking

What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. . . . . All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Humility, Reflection, Order

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.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Grieving, Wife, Forever
Ursula K. Le Guin (2008). “The Lathe Of Heaven: A Novel”, p.183, Simon and Schuster

Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Saying Goodbye, Forever, Knows
Ursula K. Le Guin (2008). “Lavinia”, p.249, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Heart, Animal, Frozen
Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.550, Simon and Schuster

As a writer, you are free.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.199, Ultramarine Publishing

...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Voice, Stories, Facts
Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.11, Penguin

What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make; I can only undo, unmake.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Character, Reality, Two

The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Oregon, Mad, Historic
Ursula K Le Guin (2014). “The Lathe of Heaven”, p.144, Diversion Books

Greed puts out the sun.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Greed, Sun
Ursula K. Le Guin (2001). “The Other Wind”, p.241, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

You May Also Like: