To oppose something is to maintain it…You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Acceptance, Opposition
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Science Fiction
The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one’s true identity in both
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Religion, Awareness
There are no right answers to wrong questions.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Questioning
If you see a whole thing – it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Realism, Perspective
Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Science Fiction
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Revolutionaries, Revolution, Revolutions
The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Questioning
Hood, immense yet withdrawn, breeding clouds about her head; going northward, the distant Adams, like a molar tooth; and then the pure cone of St. Helens, from whose long gray sweep of slope still farther northward a little bald dome stuck out like a baby looking round its mother’s skirt: Mount Rainier.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Imagination, Compassion, Hope
He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals
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: that wild country, the being of women.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Sex
If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong—not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck—if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we’ll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Birth Control
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
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
Topics: Imagination
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Uncertainty, Doubt
Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Logic
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
Topics: Women
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Invention
There’s a good deal in common between the mind’s eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Television
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.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Accomplishment, Compassion
A wizard may have subtle ways of telling the truth, and may keep the truth to himself, but if he says a thing the thing is as he says. For that is his mastery.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Rationality
I doubt the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, that child would grow up to be an eggplant.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Imagination
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
The world is in balance <…>. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Earth
Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life’s over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Birth
Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing—instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: World
The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Earth
Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Writing
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Isaac Asimov American Novelist, Critic, Popular Scientist
- Russell Hoban American Author
- Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
- Ray Bradbury American Science-Fiction Writer
- Louise Erdrich American Author
- Isaac Bashevis Singer Polish-born American Children’s Books Writer
- Sarah Orne Jewett American Children’s Books Writer
- Marie Chapian American Christian Writer
- Laura Schlessinger American Broadcaster
- Lois McMaster Bujold American Writer
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