What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Sanity
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 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 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
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 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
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
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 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 are no right answers to wrong questions.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Questioning
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Uncertainty, Doubt
Hood, immense yet withdrawn, breeding clouds about her head; going northward, the distant Adams, like a molar tooth; and then the pure cone of St. Helens, from whose long gray sweep of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 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
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 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
He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Intellectuals, Intelligence
I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Books
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
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
Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Writing
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
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
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Invention
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
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
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
It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Hope, Imagination, Compassion
Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Logic
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
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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