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Ursula K. Le Guin

332 quotes

• “If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" (1986)

• “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 (1929–2018) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Prospects for Women in Writing" (1986)

• “The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: the wild country, the being of women.All we can do is try to speak it, try to say it, try to save it. Look, we say, this is the land where your mother lived and where your daughter will live. This is your sister's country. You lived there as a child, boy or girl, you lived there — have you forgotten? All children are wild. You lived in the wild country. Why are you afraid of it?”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Woman/Wilderness" (1986)

• “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 (1929–2018) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?" (1987)

• “To me the “female principle” is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.”

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

  Recorded in: Is Gender Necessary? Redux" (1976, '87)

• “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. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. ... The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: National Book Awards, November 2014

• “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, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but that if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty ... to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.”

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

  Recorded in: Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?", in The Language of the Night (1979), p. 44

• “He sat still a long time. Music will not save us, Otto Egorin had said. Not you, or me, or her, the big golden-voiced woman who had no children and wanted none; not Lehmann who sang the song; not Schubert who had written it and was a hundred years dead. What good is music? None, Gaye thought, 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 (1929–2018) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: An die Musik (p. 168; first published in The Western Humanities Review (1961) Vol. 15, No. 3)

• “Airplanes are cramped, jammed, hectic, noisy, germy, alarming, and boring, and they serve unusually nasty food at utterly unreasonable intervals. Airports, though larger, share the crowding, vile air, noise, and relentless tension, while their food is often even nastier, consisting entirely of fried lumps of something; and the places one has to eat it in are suicidally depressing. On the airplane, everyone is locked into a seat with a belt and can move only during very short periods when they are allowed to stand in line waiting to empty their bladders until, just before they reach the toilet cubicle, a nagging loudspeaker harries them back to belted immobility. In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell. These rushing people are watched by people who sit in plastic seats bolted to the floor and who might just as well be bolted to the seats. So far, then, the airport and the airplane are equal, in the way that the bottom of one septic tank is equal, all in all, to the bottom of the next septic tank.”

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

• “I am no judge of danger. Only the brave can be that. Thrills and chills which to some people are the spice of life take the flavor right out of mine. When I’m frightened, food is sawdust—sex, with its vulnerability of body and soul, is the last thing I want—words are meaningless, thought incoherent, love paralysed. Cowardice of this degree is, I know, uncommon. Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird feeder. And they’d find the terror exhilarating and take up skydiving as soon as their broken pelvis mended. Whereas I descend slowly from the stepladder, clutching at the porch rail, and swear I’ll never go above six inches again.”

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

• “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. Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. [...] It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free. Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.”

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

• “He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal.”

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

• “People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can—egoize, we call it—show off?—to the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I am! You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing.... But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work’s sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one’s neighbors. There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One’s own pleasure, and the respect of one’s fellows. That is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mighty force.”

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

• “If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.” “That’s all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon—I don’t want it! But I’m not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, ‘O lovely!’ I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don’t give a hoot for eternity.”

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

• “No. It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren’t beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can’t always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn’t enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free—possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!”

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

• “It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, it turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have been forced to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”

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

• “There is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras.”

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

• “What we’re after is to remind ourselves that we didn’t come to Anarres for safety, but for freedom. If we must all agree, all work together, we’re no better than a machine. If an individual can’t work in solidarity with his fellows, it’s his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We’ve been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.”

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

• “War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to 'a war against' whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Afterword to the 2012 edition.

• “A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free. What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”

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

• “We may suffer for it when the balance of things rights itself, but we do not lose hope and forego art and forget the words of the Making. Nature is not unnatural. This is not a righting of the balance, but an upsetting of it. There is only one creature who can do that.” “A man?” Arren said, tentative. “We men.” “How?” “By an unmeasured desire for life.” “For life? But it isn’t wrong to want to live?” “No. But when we crave power over life—endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.”

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

• “I know what they think they seek. But I know it to be a lie. Listen to me, Arren. You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose....That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the light of sunrise and sunset, to buy safety for yourself—safety forever? That is what they seek to do on Wathort and Lorbanery and elsewhere. That is the message that those who know how to hear have heard: By denying life you may deny death and live forever!—And this message I do not hear, Arren, for I will not hear it. I will not take the counsel of despair.”

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

• “Earthsea had its beginning in 1964 in two stories that I wrote and published. They are slight; more like a sailor’s chance sighting of a couple of islands than the discovery of a new world. Earthsea exists in them, though, as the Americas existed in 1492 in Watlings Island, now known as San Salvador Island. These stories speak of the Islands, of the Outer Reach, of the great rich islands of the Archipelago, the Inner Lanes, the roadsteads white with ships, and the golden roofs of Havnor. Earthsea is there, though unexplored. Some things mentioned—trolls, black magic—will never appear again. But one element in each story will turn out to be part of the deep fabric of Earthsea.”

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

• “Beyond the elegant chapter headings by Ruth Robbins for the Parnassus’s edition of A Wizard of Earthsea, and Gail Garraty’s fine woodcut-like art in the same style for the early Atheneum editions, until very recently, the books of Earthsea had no illustrations. This was partly by my own decision. After Ruth’s unique wraparound jacket for the first edition of A Wizard of Earthsea—with its splendidly stylized, copper-brown portrait face—cover art for the books mostly went out of my control. The results could be ghastly—the droopy, lily-white wizard of the first Puffin UK paperback; the silly man with sparks shooting out of his fingers that replaced him. Some covers were quite pretty in themselves, but delicate medieval persons on twee islands with castles with pointy towers had nothing to do with my earthy, salty Earthsea. And as for copper or brown or black skin, forget it! Earthsea was bathed in bleach. I was ashamed of the covers that gave the reader every wrong idea about the people and the place. I resented publishers’ art departments that met any suggestion that the cover might resemble something or someone in the book by rejecting it, informing me loftily that they Knew what would Sell (a mystery no honest cover designer would ever claim to know). Paperback houses wanted commercial, all-purpose fantasy covers; YA departments wanted no suggestion of adult concerns. So I discouraged all suggestions of illustration.”

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

• “As the reputation of the books grew, I began to be granted, however grudgingly, more input on the cover art. From that period, 1991, Margaret Chodos-Irvine’s four beautiful jacket paintings for the first four books (Atheneum), and the gorgeous metallic covers of the last two (Harcourt). These last were thanks to my editor , who fought long and fiercely for me. Years later, Michael let me see the first draft the cover department sent him: a fat green dragon, clearly modelled from one of those cute wind-up dinosaurs that spit sparks, sitting up like a dog begging, in a cloud of pink steam. St. Michael fought that dragon and defeated it, but it took him months.”

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

• “I have written so often of how and why it took me so long to write the six books of Earthsea that the story has become like the book you have to read to your four-year-old every night for weeks—You really want to hear it again? Oh well, okay, here goes! I wrote the first three books in five years: ’68, ’70, ’72. I was on a roll. None of them was closely plotted or planned before writing; in each of them much of the story came to me as I followed what I wrote where it inevitably led. I started confidently on the fourth book. The central character was Tenar again, of course, to balance it out. I knew she hadn’t stayed and studied wizardry with Ogion, but had married a farmer and had children, and that the story was going to bring her and Ged back together. But by the middle of the first chapter, I realized that I didn’t know who she was—now. I didn’t know why she’d done what she’d done or what she had to do. I didn’t know her story, or Ged’s. I couldn’t plot or plan it. I couldn’t write it. It took me eighteen years to learn how.”

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

• “I was forty-two in 1972; in 1990, I was sixty. During those years, the way of understanding society that we’re obliged to call feminism (despite the glaring absence of its opposite term masculism) had grown and flourished. At the same time an increasing sense of something missing in my own writing, which I could not identify, had begun to paralyze my storytelling ability. Without the feminist writers and thinkers of the 1970s and ’80s, I don’t know if I ever could have identified this absence as the absence of women at the center. Why was I, a woman, writing almost entirely about what men did? Why because I was a reader who read, loved, and learned from the books my culture provided me; and they were almost entirely about what men did. The women in them were seen in relation to men, essentially having no existence unrelated to male existence. I knew what men did, in books, and how one wrote about them. But when it came to what women did, or how to write about it, all I had to call on was my own experiences—uncertified, unapproved by the great Consensus of Criticism, lacking the imprimatur of the Canon of Literature, piping up solo against the universally dominant and almost unison chorus of the voices of men talking about men. Oh, well, now, was that true? Hadn’t I read Jane Austen? Emily Brontë? Charlotte Brontë? Elizabeth Gaskell? George Eliott? Virginia Woolf? Other, long-silenced voices of women writing about both women and men were being brought back into print, into life. And my contemporary women writers were showing me the way. It was high time I learned to write of and from my own body, my own gender, in my own voice.”

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

• “Though Tehanu is named for the child character, neither it nor the two books after it are books “for children” or definable as “young adult.” I had abandoned any attempt to suit my vision of Earthsea to a publisher’s category or a critic’s prejudice. The notion that fantasy is only for the immature rises from an obstinate misunderstanding of both maturity and the imagination. So, as my protagonists grew older, I trusted my younger readers to follow them or not, as and when they chose. In the PR-driven world of publishing, that constituted a real risk, and I am very grateful to the editors who took that risk with me.”

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

• “I guess I can't, or my subconscious can't, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you're trying to use, not my rational mind. Maybe rationally I could conceive of the human species not trying to kill each other off by nations, in fact rationally it's easier to conceive of than the motives of war. But you're handling something outside reason. You're trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn't suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?”

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

• “He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecroppers’s wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.”

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

• “What's wrong with changing things? Now, I wonder if this self-canceling, centerpoised personality of yours leads you to look at things defensively. I want you to try to detach yourself from yourself and try to see your own viewpoint from the outside, objectively. You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life's not a static object, after all. It's a process. There's no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life-evolution-the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy—existence itself—is essentially change.”

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

• “When things don't change any longer, that's the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less balance there is—and the more life. I'm pro-life, George. Life itself is a huge gamble against the odds, against all odds! You can't try to live safely, there's no such thing as safety. Stick your neck out of your shell, then, and live fully! It's not how you get there, but where you get to that counts. What you're afraid to accept, here, is that we're engaged in a really great experiment, you and I. We're on the brink of discovering and controlling, for the good of all mankind, a whole new force, an entire new field of antientropic energy, of the life-force, of the will to act, to do, to change!”

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