Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Excess is excrement.
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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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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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Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however - that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc
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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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Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.
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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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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.
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Sometimes one’s very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.
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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.
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'A king has soldiers, servants, messengers, lieutenants. He governs through his servants. Where are the servants of this-Anti-king?''In our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live! The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple.'
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'The mission I am on overrides all personal debts and loyalties.''If so,' said the stranger with fierce certainty, 'it is an immoral mission.'
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No doors were locked, few shut. There were no disguises and no advertisements. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to the hand.
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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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To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
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She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
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I've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.
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No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.
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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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Uninfluenced by others, he never knew he influenced them; he had no idea they liked him.