Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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The creative adult is the child who survived.
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people.
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Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
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I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
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To be whole is to be part;true voyage is return.
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She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.
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I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?
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Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
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He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand.
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To oppose something is to maintain it.
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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.
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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.
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If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
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There’s seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.
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It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
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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.
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You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do...
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You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit or, it is nowhere.
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.
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You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.
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No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.
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O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn’t then.