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Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes - Page 2

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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.

To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Great Friend, Great Idea, Oneself

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

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

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Wall, Social, Function

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Earth Day, World, Ruins

What good is music? None ... and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, 'You are irrelevant'; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, 'Listen.' For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Army, Men, Sky
Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “Orsinian Tales”, p.112, Library of America

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Home, Joy, Suffering
Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “The Dispossessed”, p.144, Hachette UK

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Thinking, Reality, Insanity

The light is the left hand of darkness.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Light, Hands, Darkness
"The Left Hand of Darkness". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969.

Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing -- instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Country, Lying, Eye
A Left-Handed Commencement Address, delivered 22 May 1983, Mills College, Oakland, California

I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Loss, Thinking, Voice

It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Needs, Knows
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “Tales from Earthsea”, p.180, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principle moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Names, Interesting, Political

Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Hate, Hatred, Sticks
Ursula K. Le Guin, Todd Barton, Margaret Chodos-Irvine, George Hersh (1985). “Always coming home”, Harperaudio

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Light, Darkness, Shadow

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people .

Ursula K. Le Guin
Skills, People, Taught
Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, p.208, Shambhala Publications

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Kings, Divine Right, Capitalism
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

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Real, Thinking, Hard Times
Ursula K. Le Guin (2018). “Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.441, Hachette UK

All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Patterns, Truth Is, Whole
Ursula K. Le Guin (2017). “Five Ways to Forgiveness”, p.123, Library of America

The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?

Ursula K. Le Guin
Dragons, Fantasy, Myth
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Tombs of Atuan”, p.102, Simon and Schuster

You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Home, Long
"The Dispossessed". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974.

There's a point, around the age of 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.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Age, Twenties, Rest Of Your Life

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Lying, Light, Hands
Ursula K. LeGuin (2017). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.193, Hachette UK

We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Healing, Meaning Of Life, Asking
Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “Very Far Away from Anywhere Else”, p.71, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

To have a choice at all is to be privileged.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Choices, Privileged
Source: www.guernicamag.com

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Book, Reading, Writing
Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.198, Grove Press

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