Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
To oppose something is to maintain it.
-
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
-
He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.
-
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
-
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.
-
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
-
If I don’t speak truth I can’t seek truth.
-
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.
-
Excess is excrement.
-
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.
-
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
-
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!
-
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
-
What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
-
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.
-
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?
-
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
-
Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.
-
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.
-
Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.
-
If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
-
It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
-
'The mission I am on overrides all personal debts and loyalties.''If so,' said the stranger with fierce certainty, 'it is an immoral mission.'
-
Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind, it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument.