Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
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What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone.
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After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory.
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She had come to Aka to learn how to sing this world's tune, to dance its dance; and at last, she thought, away from the city's endless noise, she was beginning to hear the music and to learn how to move to it.
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A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist can’t hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.
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Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
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He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.
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The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.
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A man can trust his luck, but a society can’t; and cultural change, like random mutation, may make things chancier. So they have gone very slowly. At any one point in their history a hasty observer would say that all technological progress and diffusion had ceased. Yet it never has. Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.
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Easy victories aren’t worth winning.
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A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer's job is to be its medium.
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At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
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That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
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Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.
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A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.
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Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.
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We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
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The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.
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Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.
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It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
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The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes.
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Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew.
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He detested them for forcing helplessness upon him.
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It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.