Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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If I don’t speak truth I can’t seek truth.
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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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We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.
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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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As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
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To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being.
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Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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To oppose something is to maintain it.
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To see a candle’s light, one must take it into a dark place.
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The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.
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It may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.
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No, I don’t understand him, but he is worth listening to.
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When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
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A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
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'There’s a point, around age twenty,' Bedap said, 'when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.'
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it’s simply meaningless. We don’t live in order to die, we live in order to live.
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The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
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Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.