Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.

Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love.

The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.

Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.

See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.

Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison.

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.

Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

To have a choice at all is to be privileged.

First sentences are doors to worlds.

O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.

To see a candle's light, one must take it into a dark place. This is the same as to see the good and be grateful, one must compare and contrast it with something worse - not better!

If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.

The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.

It is useless work that darkens the heart.

Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.

I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being.

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.

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.

Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.

Very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.

In war everybody is a prisoner.

Dreams take short cuts.

As a writer, you are free.

At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.

Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.

When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place.

There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.

Love is the true condition of human life.

Go to bed; tired is stupid.

A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer's job is to be its medium.

There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.

In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.

They can send death at once, but life is slower.

Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.

Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.

One must work with time and not against it.

What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.

What is more arrogant than honesty?

You cannot blame everything on the enemy.

there are times when you have to speak because silence is betrayal.

But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord." "It might to keep it open.

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.

Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.

The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.