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
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
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
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Invention
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
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
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
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
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Questioning
It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Hope, Compassion, 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
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Time Management, Information, Value of Time
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
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
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
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
Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Writing
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
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
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Sanity
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
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
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
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
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
I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Books
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 world is in balance <…>. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Earth
Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk’s flight
on the empty sky.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Silence, Light, Balance
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
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
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
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
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Science Fiction
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
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: Books, Reading
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
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
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
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
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