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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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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To be whole is to be part;true voyage is return.
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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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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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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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To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
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Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
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If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
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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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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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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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There’s seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.
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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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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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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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O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn’t then.
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The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.
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Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?
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To oppose something is to maintain it.
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If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
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And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.
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I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.