Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin (Science-fiction writer)

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

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Doubt, Uncertainty

Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Logic

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: Opposition, Acceptance

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

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Time Management, Information, Value of Time

The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Power

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?…if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.
Ursula K. Le Guin

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Compassion, Hope, Imagination

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
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: Revolutions, Revolution, Revolutionaries

The world is in balance <…>. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Earth

A Woman is home caring for her children! even if she can’t. Trapped in this well-built trap, A Woman blames her mother for luring her into it, while ensuring that her own daughter never gets out; she recoils from the idea of sisterhood and doesn’t believe women have friends, because it probably means something unnatural, and anyhow, A Woman is afraid of women. She’s a male construct, and she’s afraid women will deconstruct her. She’s afraid of everything, because she can’t change. Thighs forever thin and shining hair and shining teeth and she’s my Mom, too, all seven percent of her. And she never grows old.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Women

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

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

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

In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
Ursula K. Le Guin

I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Books

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le Guin

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le Guin

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

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: Compassion, Accomplishment

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

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Questioning

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

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Sanity

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

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 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

There are no right answers to wrong questions.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Questioning

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

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *