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Ursula K. Le Guin

332 quotes

“She obeys me, but only because she wants to.” “It’s the only justification for obedience,” Ged observed.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn’t then.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s no way to use power for good.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s people all over these parts, and maybe beyond, who think, as you said, that nobody can be wise alone. So these people try to hold to each other.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Highdrake said that to make love is to unmake power.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The solution lies in secrecy,” said Medra. “But so does the problem.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ignorant power is a bane!”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn’t saved, isn’t taught?”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It always seemed to me they’re sort of alike,” he said, “magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What’s that all about?” Golden said to his wife, a rhetorical question. She looked at him and said nothing, a non-rhetorical answer.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You’ll know what to say when the time comes. That’s the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it. And the rest is silence.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the mystery and wisdom of the Masters, when it’s out in the daylight, doesn’t amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade—wonderful illusions. But people don’t want to know that. They want the illusions, the mysteries. Who can blame them? There’s so little in life that’s beautiful or worthy.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe that’s what the Masters are afraid of. Maybe celibacy isn’t as necessary as the Rule of Roke teaches. Maybe it’s not a way of keeping the power pure, but of keeping the power to themselves.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Obsessed with tricking the girl, he had fallen into the trap he laid for her. Bitterly he recognised that he was always believing his own lies, caught in nets he had elaborately woven.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Before the gods and after, always, are the streams. Caves, stones, hills. Trees. The earth. The darkness of the earth.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She knew it, but she did not want to know it.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that’s the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it’s life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Manipulated, one manipulates others.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Statesmen remember things selectively.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Greed puts out the sun.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not right to want to die,” the Summoner said....“For the very old, the very ill, it may be. But life is given us. Surely it’s wrong not to hold and treasure that great gift!” “Death also is given us,” said the king.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that I 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 lived, the breath I breathed.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the name is the magic.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When Tehanu came out, a good many critics and readers saw it as mere gender politics and resented it as a betrayal of the romantic tradition of heroism. As I tried to say in the essay, not to change viewpoint would, for me, have been the betrayal. By including women fully in my story, I gained a larger understanding of what heroism is and found a true and longed-for way back into my Earthsea—now a very much greater, stranger, more mysterious place than it had ever appeared before.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never say never; never say last!”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If a dragon comes to you and says, “Arw sobriost!” you don’t ask questions. You do what it says. There is a great taloned foot, set like a step in front of you; and above it, the crook of the elbow joint; and above that, the jutting shoulder blade: a stairway. You clamber up that stairway, feeling the fiery inner heat of the dragon’s body. You settle yourself between the vast wings, take hold of the big spine-thorn before you. And the dragon lifts, takes off, takes you where you and it must go, flying on the other wind, flying free.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is nothing important except people. A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But in fact, isn't that man's very purpose on earth - to do things, change things, run things, make a better world? No! What is his purpose, then? 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 (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He knew that in so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You have to help another person. But it’s not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you’re doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn’t enough. You have to...be in touch. He isn’t in touch. No one else, no thing even, has an existence of its own for him; he sees the world only as a means to his end. It doesn’t make any difference if his end is good; means are all we’ve got.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How could anybody think this man was sick? All right, so he had funny dreams. That was better than being plain mean and hateful, like about one quarter of the people she had ever met.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But maybe you're just as glad he’s not a shrink, eh? Awful to have your spouse analyzing your unconscious desires across the dinner table, eh?”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He looked at the machine, its cabinets all standing open; it should be destroyed, he thought. But he had no idea how to do it, nor any will to try. Destruction was not his line; and a machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source