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Ursula K. Le Guin

332 quotes

• “We read books to find out who we are.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Prophets and Mirrors: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing" in The Living Light 7:3 (Fall, 1970). Reprinted in The Language of the Night (Ultramarine Publishing, 1979).

• “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 (1929–2018) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: American SF and The Other" in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975. Reprinted in The Language of the Night, 1979.

• “True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero — really look — and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. “You must change your life,” he said. When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction" (1976)

• “I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to. (There is quite an array of jets, buses and hacks which you can ride to Success; but that is a different destination.) It is a pretty wild country. There are, of course, roads. Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Language of the Night (1979)

• “Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it’s simply meaningless. We don’t live in order to die, we live in order to live.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Creatures on My Mind" in Unlocking the Air and Other Stories (1996), p. 65

• “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 (1929–2018) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Operating Instructions in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004)

• “To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Question I Get Asked Most Often in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004)

• “What's to gain by silence?”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Cannoc, in Gifts (2004)

• “Sometimes one’s very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The magician" by Maya Jaggi in The Guardian (17 December 2005)

• “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 (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “As a fiction writer, I don't speak message. I speak story. Sure, my story means something, but if you want to know what it means, you have to ask the question in terms appropriate to storytelling. Terms such as message are appropriate to expository writing, didactic writing, and sermons—different languages from fiction. The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1929–2018) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: A Few Words to a Young Writer" (2008)

• “If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there's no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little kids can't do it; babies are morally monsters—completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Magician" interview with The Guardian (2005)

• “Mysticism,” she said, in the tone of voice of one warning a companion about dog-shit on the path.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Do you mean,” Lidi said in a tone of deep existential disgust, “that we have to believe in it to make it work?” “You have to believe in yourself in order to act, don’t you?” Tai said. “No,” the navigator said. “Absolutely not. I don’t believe in myself. I know some things. Enough to go on.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Mede spoke with amused tolerance, as physicists generally speak of biologists.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Masters” p. 46 (originally published in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, February 1963)

• “Many feminists have been grieved or aggrieved by The Left Hand of Darkness because the androgynes in it are called ‘he’ throughout. In the third person singular, the English generic pronoun is the same as the masculine pronoun. A fact worth reflecting upon. And it’s a trap, with no way out, because the exclusion of the feminine (she) and the neuter (it) from the generic/masculine (he) makes the use of either of them more specific, more unjust, as it were, than the use of ‘he.’ And I find made-up pronouns, ‘te’ and ‘heshe’ and so on, dreary and annoying.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “There is not much good spending twelve hours a day in a black hole in the ground all your life long if there’s nothing there, no secret, no treasure, nothing hidden.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Shelley was kicked out of Oxford—I think the story is unauthenticated, but who cares—because he painted a sign on the end wall of a dead-end alley: THIS WAY TO HEAVEN. I feel that every now and then his sign needs repainting.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Hughes, who had entered the space program from astrophysics, came with a very good record, in fact a brilliant one. This troubled many of his military superiors, to whom high intelligence was a code word for instability and insubordination.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Field of Vision” pp. 228-229 (originally published in Galaxy, October 1973)

• “They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Field of Vision” p. 243 (originally published in Galaxy, October 1973)

• “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1974

• “As we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Favoritism, elitism, leader-worship, they crept back and cropped out everywhere. But she had never hoped to see them eradicated in her lifetime, in one generation; only Time works the great changes.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Day Before the Revolution” p. 265 (originally published in Galaxy, August 1974)

• “After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Day Before the Revolution” p. 270 (originally published in Galaxy, August 1974)

• “What was the good working for freedom all your life and ending up without any freedom at all?”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Day Before the Revolution” p. 272 (originally published in Galaxy, August 1974)

• “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Day Before the Revolution” p. 272 (originally published in Galaxy, August 1974)

• “He had waked her; he had given her what she lacked, and what few men could have given her: the sense of peril, which is the root of love.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I was afraid I’d fail. So I didn’t work.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Brothers and Sisters (p. 93; first published in The Little Magazine (1976) Vol. 10, Nos. 1 & 2)

• “A man, he walked with men across a barren plain blue with flowers in brief April; they shared with him their anger, their barren helpless obduracy and the brief blue fire of their anger.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: A Week in the Country (p. 133; first published in The Little Magazine (1976) Vol. 9, No. 4)

• “What the devil do you come to me for? And burst into tears? And then tell me thanks very much for your suggestion but I shall continue to attempt the impossible? The arrogance, the unreasonableness—no, I can endure all that—but the stupidity, the absolute stupidity of artists, I cannot stand it any longer!”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: An die Musik (pp. 159-160; first published in The Western Humanities Review (1961) Vol. 15, No. 3)

• “He had been a handsome man, when they married, fourteen years ago. A handsome, happy man, proud and kind, very good at his work. There had been a splendor to him, a wholeness. That was gone. There was no more room in the world for whole people, they took up too much space. What she had done to him was only a part of the general program for cutting him and people like him down to size, for chopping and paring and breaking up, so that in the texture of life nothing large, nothing hard, nothing grand should remain.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “For heroes do not make history—that is the historians’ job—but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Josef liked to read books, not pack them.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “And fourteen—fourteen is such a fearful age, when you find out so fast what you’re capable of being, but also what a toll the world expects.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Imaginary Countries (p. 204; first published in The Harvard Advocate (Winter 1973)

• “The untold story mothers the lie.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I expect people who don’t look like me not to be like me, a reasonable expectation, as expectations go; but it makes my mind slow to admit that people who look like me may not be like me.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “And your soul is in your body.” “Such as tripe?”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In fact, the Veksi resolutely ignore visitors from other planes, considering them to be the impotent and evil-smelling ghosts of dead enemies who will go away if no attention at all is paid to them. This has generally proved to be true.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The Veksi are an angry species. Their social life consists largely of arguments, recriminations, quarrels, fights, outbursts of fury, fits of the sulks, brawls, feuds, and impulsive acts of vengeance.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we knew it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “After hard fighting, when six or seven men had been wounded or killed, the war chiefs on both sides would simultaneously declare a victory.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I have not tried to investigate it. It’s no use. There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation. Even after they collapse, imploding into a cratered ruin stinking of burnt stockholder and surrounded by an impenetrable barrier formed by members of Congress and other government officials holding hands and wearing yellow tape marked Private Property, No Trespassing, Keep Out, No Hunting, Fishing, or Accounting—even then there is no truth in them.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “People who sleep only two or three hours in the twenty-four are always geniuses. The ones you hear about, anyway. Never mind if the ones you don’t hear about are dolts. Insomnia is genius. It must be. Think of all the work you could do, the thoughts you could think, the books you could read, the love you could make, while the dull clods lie snoring.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Are you happy if you aren’t conscious of being happy? What is consciousness? Is consciousness the great boon we consider it? Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher? Better off in what way and for what? There have been lizards for longer than there have been philosophers. Lizards do not bathe, do not bury their dead, and do not perform scientific experiments. There have been many more lizards than philosophers. Are lizards, then, a more successful species than philosophers? Does God love lizards better than he loves philosophers?”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I am not comfortable with the phrase “specific obsession,” but “cultural instinct” is worse.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It is sad that so lovely a plane must not be visited, fortunate that those who have glimpsed it have been able to describe it for us. Still, some people go there. Ordinarily selfish people justify their invasion of Zuehe by the familiar expedient of considering themselves as not like all those other people who go to Zuehe and spoil it. Extremely selfish people go to Zuehe to boast about it, precisely because it is fragile, destructible, therefore a trophy.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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