Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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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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When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
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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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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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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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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
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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.
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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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He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.
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My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
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If I don’t speak truth I can’t seek truth.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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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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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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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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The game must be played, and played their way, though they made all the rules and had all the skill. His ineptitude did not matter. His honesty did. He was staked now totally on one belief: that an honest man cannot be cheated, that truth, if the game be played through right to the end, will lead to truth.
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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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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.
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Excess is excrement.
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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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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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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!