Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel.
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It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
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In the self-important, Falco reflected, there is always room for a little more self-importance.
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Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.
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The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
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I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
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By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.
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All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
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Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
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Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.
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Where my guides lead me in kindness I follow, follow lightly, and there are no footprints in the dust behind us.
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Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.
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The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.
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... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
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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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He had almost yielded, but not quite. He had not consented. It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.
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Statesmen remember things selectively.
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'It is not right to want to die,' the Summoner said....'For the very old, the very ill, it may be. But life is given us. Surely it’s wrong not to hold and treasure that great gift!''Death also is given us,' said the king.
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She too had lost her luck, and known death, and gone on.
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It is light that defeats the dark.
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'What’s that all about?' Golden said to his wife, a rhetorical question. She looked at him and said nothing, a non-rhetorical answer.
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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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I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.