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Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes about Children

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The creative adult is the child who has survived.

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

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Compassion, Grieving
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.58, Ultramarine Publishing

Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk--performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Reading, Men
Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, p.143, Shambhala Publications

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Real, Book
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.44, Ultramarine Publishing

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Mother, Children, Growing Up
"The Dispossessed". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974.

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Growing Up, Believe
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.44, Ultramarine Publishing

What children don't understand, and can't understand until they grow up some, is how much the whole fabric and process of human society depends on everybody agreeing to ignore, most of the time, the fact that all of us are, most of the time, inadequate, incompetent, pitiful, and, in fact, naked to our enemies. None of us really has very much in the way of spiritual, moral clothing. We dress ourselves in rags. And we agree to say nothing about it. To a very large extent, it is human charity that clothes us.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Spiritual, Children, Growing Up

As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Powerful, Wish
Ursula K. Le Guin, Todd Barton, Margaret Chodos-Irvine, George Hersh (1985). “Always Coming Home”, p.29, Univ of California Press

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Growing Up, Eggplant
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.42, Ultramarine Publishing

If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong -- not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck -- if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we'll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Thinking, Survival
Ursula K. Le Guin (2017). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.31, Grove Press

What is a woman's power then?" she asked. "I don't think we know." "When has a woman power because she's a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while..." "In her house, maybe." She looked around the kitchen. "But the doors are shut," she said, "the doors are locked." "Because you're valuable." "Oh yes. We're precious. So long as we're powerless.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Thinking, Doors
Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “Tehanu: The Fourth Book of Earthsea”, p.90, Hachette UK

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Growing Up, Believe
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.44, Ultramarine Publishing

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Dragons, Challenges
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.44, Ultramarine Publishing

Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Book, Writing
"A Message About Messages". Personal website, www.ursulakleguin.com.

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Wall, Real
Ursula K. Le Guin (2009). “The Dispossessed”, p.6, Harper Collins

It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Stars, Children, Distance
"Transcript for the Piece Audio version of A Wizard of Earthsea: A Big Read Documentary". www.prx.org.

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Grateful, Revolution
Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.107, Grove Press

No matter how successful, beloved, influential her work was, when a woman author dies, nine times out of ten, she gets dropped from the lists, the courses, the anthologies, while the men get kept. ... If she had the nerve to have children, her chances of getting dropped are higher still. ... So if you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Suicide, Children, Taken
"Prospects for Women in Writing" (speech), Portland, Me., Sept. 1986

If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?" "Hah!" went Tenar; and presently, with some cunning, she said, "Haven't there been queens? Weren't they women of power?" "A queen's only a she-king," said Ged. She snorted. "I mean, men give her power. They let her use their power. But it isn't hers, is it? It isn't because she's a woman that she's powerful, but despite it.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Kings, Queens, Children

I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women... women tend to eat less... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Men, Vocabulary
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Left Hand Of Darkness”, p.149, Hachette UK

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'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Imagination, Stories
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.131, Ultramarine Publishing

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