Ursula K Le Guin Quotes

My dogs have barked at a beggar tonight and he proves a prince of starlight. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I don't know. I love the idea of democracy, the hope, yes, I love that. I couldn't live without that. But the country? You mean the thing on the map, lines, everything inside the lines is good and nothing outside them matters? How can an adult love such a childish idea? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose ... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

But because she was not a girl now, she was not awed, but only wondered at how men ordered their world into this dance of masks, and how easily a woman might learn to dance it. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

There was something lacking – in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not strong enough to take what was so generously offered. He felt himself dry and arid, like a desert plant, in this beautiful oasis. Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off his soul; the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could not drink. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Figurines and souvenirs and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Because she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and ends was, to her too, false. For her as for him, there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Pregnant women have no ethics. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little ... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It takes a while to spoil a world, but it can be done. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

All the mystery and wisdom of the masters, when it's out in the daylight, doesn't amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade. Wonderful illusions. But people don't want to know that. They want the illusions, the mysteries. Who can blame them? There's so little in life that's beautiful and worthy. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Judgement is poverty. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

In this he saw that Ogion had been right: the shadow could not draw on his power, so long as he was turned against it. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Orr slept. He dreamed. There was no rub. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

She told Everra that he had given her and Sallo the soul's hunger for books and thoughts, and must not deprive them now that Sallo was starving among the inanities of the silk rooms and she among the pomposities of merchants and the illiteracy of politicians. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It is very seldom," the young man said at last, "that dragons ask to do men favours."
"But it is very common," said the dragon, "for cats to play with mice before they kill them. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Age and illness made one a dualist ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The sleeper dreamed. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Some men who live hard and in good health can't believe sickness or weakness is anything but laziness, a sham. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there's more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model... So I was sent alone, for your sake? Or for my own? I don't know. Yes, it has made things difficult. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I tried to think about what he had asked me to do, to step so far beyond myself. I found it difficult to think about. It was as if it hung over me, this huge choice I must make, this future I could not imagine. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Most bigots are sincere. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

But you're so strong. I wish I were strong. I just like eating. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Most best-sellers are written for readers who are willing to be passive consumers. The blurbs on their covers often highlight the coercive, aggressive power of the text - compulsive page-turner, gut-wrenching, jolting, mind-searing, heart-stopping - what is this, electroshock torture? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don't realize that. And you can't write unless you read. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Man's singularity is his divinity. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If the rowan's roots are shallow, it bears no crown. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Later, when Ged thought back upon that night, he knew that had none had touched him when he lay thus spirit-lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet in that wisdom Ged saw something akin to his own power, something that went as deep as wizardry. From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the greet slow gestures of trees. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

His words cost him so much, she thought, not like hers that just came dancing out of the air and went back into it. He spoke from his marrow. It made what he said a solemn compliment, which she accepted gratefully... ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Go to bed; tired is stupid. Tomorrow ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Even a poet cannot get everything right. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Neither anger nor hope served any purpose. Nor grief. It was not the time for grief yet. Rekam was here with them, and they would delight in him as long as he was here. As long as his life. He is my great gift. You do hold my joy. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I saw that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't save each other. Or ourselves."
"What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You're denying brotherhood, Shevek!" the tall girl cried.
"No - no, I'm not. I'm trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins - it begins in shared pain. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, 'Arek!' Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Ai taught me a Terran game played on squares with little stones, called go, an excellent difficult game. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You must be Arha, or you must be Tenar. You cannot be both. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?'
... 'Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

There's no right answer
to the wrong question.
Now what do we do? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The trouble is, women have to be absolutely first class to get where third-class men get. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

She thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerless. But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame. ~ 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

The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there . ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Life in the auntring, or for a settled man, is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box - Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I know who you are," she said. "You're my enemy. The true believer. The righteous man with the righteous mission. The one that jails people for reading and burns the books. That persecutes people who do exercises the wrong way. That dumps out the medicine and pisses on it. That pushes the button that sends the drones to drop the bombs. And hides behind a bunker and doesn't get hurt. Shielded by God. Or the state. Or whatever lie he uses to hide his envy and self-interest and cowardice and lust for power. It took me a while to see you, though. You saw me right away. You knew I was your enemy. Was unrighteous. How did you know it? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

This Stone

He went looking for a road
that doesn't lead to death.
He went looking for that road
and found it.
It was a stone road.
He walked that road
that doesn't lead to death.
He walked on it awhile
before he stopped,
having turned to stone.
Now he stands there on that road
that doesn't lead to death
not going anywhere.
He can't dance.
from his eyes stones fall.
The rainbow people pass him
crossing that road, long-legged, light-stepping,
going from the Four Houses
to the dancing in the Five Houses.
They pick up his tears.
This stone is a tear
from his eye, this stone
given me on the mountain
by one who died before my birth,
this stone, this stone. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I am ... persuaded that Woolf was right, that every novel has a characteristic rhythm. And that if the writer hasn't listened for that rhythm and followed it, the sentences will be lame, the characters will be puppets, the story will be false. And if the writer can hold to that rhythm, the book will have some beauty. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do - they never adapt either. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Why is it that if you say you don't enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren't going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as "loathing" it?
The little Time article itself is fairly accurate about what I've said about e-reading, but the title of the series, "Famous Writers Who Loathe E-Books," reflects or caters to a silly idea: that not being interested in using a particular technology is the same as hating and despising it. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

How did you get all this?" "Stole it," said the one-time prime minister of Karhide, ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

'The fact is,' I said, 'that you're unable, or unwilling, to believe in the fact that I believe in you.' ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I think if you have lost a great happiness and try to recall it, you are only asking for sorrow, but if you do not try to dwell on the happiness, sometimes you find it dwelling in your heart and body, silent but sustaining. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others ... Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He was one whose power was akin to, and as strong as, the Old Powers of the earth; one who talked with dragons, and held off earthquakes with his word. And there he lay asleep on the dirt, with a little thistle growing by his hand. It was very strange. Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed. The glory of the sky touched his dusty hair, and turned the thistle gold for a little while. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

..he says, but that's wizard's talk, making things seem great by great words. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

There is no more subversive act than the act of writing from a woman's experience of life using a woman's judgment.
"Prospects for Women in Writing" 1986 ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

What good is music? None, Gage thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and leaders, music says, 'You are irrelevant'; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, 'Listen.' For being saved is not the point. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses that men build for themselves, that they may see the sky. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I walk on the ground and the ground's walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world. Only ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

What books didn't influence me? If only someone would ask that! I've been waiting for years to answer it. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, I will say, had absolutely no influence on me except to cause hours of incredulous boredom. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You're a respectable woman, dearie, and her reputation is a woman's wealth."
"Her wealth," Tenar repeated in the same blank way; then she said it again: "Her wealth. Her treasure. Her hoard. Her value ... ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

As for ideology, the Hell with it.
All of it. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

In this effort to attain security, independence and privacy of course were suspect.... ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Wold felt sorry for him, as he often did for young men, who have not seen how passion and plan over and over are wasted, how their lives and acts are wasted between desire and fear. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He, after all, had no standards of manliness, of virility, to complicate his pride. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It win be a device that will permit communication without any time interval between two points in space. The device will not transmit messages, of course; simultaneity is identity. But to our perceptions, that simultaneity will function as a transmission, a sending. So we will be able to use it to talk between worlds, without the long waiting for the message to go and the reply to return that electromagnetic impulses require. It is really a very simple matter. Like a kind of telephone. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won't talk about anything except the injustice of the United States income tax structure toward people with fluctuating income, or how to breed Black Angus cows, or something. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work - his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy - and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe. He ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our better journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us. For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that. I do not know if we were right. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I think one cannot be left alive among so many deaths without feeling unendurable shame. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Everything is old, here. We are old - the Masters."
"You're not," Irian said. She thought him between thirty and forty[ ... ]
"But I came far. Miles can be years. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It was men's ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The really terrible thing about being young is the triviality ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom...and that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, when they need it, and that's always. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We can't stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies ... ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin