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?
- 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 Children’s Books Writer
- 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 Novelist
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