Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.

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

No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.

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.

Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.

A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.

Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.

I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.

The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .

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

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

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

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.

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.

I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

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

Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.

If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ...But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.

Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.

There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.

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

The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.

While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

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.

You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.

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

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.

We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.

The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.

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.

Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up.

There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.

To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.

One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies.

We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

Success is somebody else's failure.

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.

Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.

Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.

As a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing,but does only and wholly what he must do.

Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.