Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929–2018) was an American novelist, poet, and author of science fiction, fantasy, and children’s tales. She published over 100 short stories, 20 novels, 11 children’s books, six volumes of poetry, and four volumes of translation.
Le Guin is renowned for her cheerful, Taoist vision of the future. Her writings revealed that even the most oppressive conditions could be reinstated to fullness through balance and assimilation of opposites. Her novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969,) now taught commonly in high schools and colleges, is set on a planet whose humanlike natives are neither male nor female—these hermaphrodites experience gender only briefly in the course of procreation.
Le Guin created fantastic worlds in her novels and brought strong-willed feminist protagonists into the limelight. Her assessment of male power and its social consequences (conflict, aggression, and authority) made her very influential in feminist circles. Her works of science fiction and fantasy include the Hainish trilogy (Rocannon’s World, 1966; Planet of Exile, 1966; and City of Illusions, 1967) and the best-selling Earthsea series (beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Ursula K. Le Guin
What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hide hole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luke Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there’s a message there, I don’t think I want to hear it.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Science Fiction
The tricks of illusion came to him so easily that it seemed he had been born knowing them and needed only to be reminded
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Illusion
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
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
Love doesn’t just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Love
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
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Equality
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Questioning
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Invention
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Reason
The story – from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace – is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Storytelling
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Women
Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Logic
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
The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography. For the ultimate selling job on ultimate violence one must read those works of fiction issued by our government as manuals of civil defense, in which you learn that there’s nothing to be afraid of if you’ve stockpiled lots of dried fruit.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Pornography
Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Faith
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Science Fiction
I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Books
Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Writing
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
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
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
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
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
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Uncertainty, Doubt
There are no right answers to wrong questions.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Questioning
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Storytelling
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
Topics: Reading, Books
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