Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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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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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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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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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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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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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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There’s seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.
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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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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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The creative adult is the child who survived.
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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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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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He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.
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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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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
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Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
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You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!
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The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
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If I don’t speak truth I can’t seek truth.