Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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One voice, speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time; plenty of time.
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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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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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All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
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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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I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.
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They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!
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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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There is nothing important except people. A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.
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Nobody had made this wilderness, and there was no evil in it and no good; it simply was.
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I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying. It would be foolish to worry about anything while one died.
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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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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.
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To hear, one must be silent.
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If they come prying they can leave curious.
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Statesmen remember things selectively.
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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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Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
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He resolved not to speak again until he had controlled his temper.
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There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
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Why should he remember her? Why should she remember him? She had other things to think about. She was a grown woman. She had to face life. Even if all life had to show her was a locked door, and behind the locked door, no room.
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To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.
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'In innocence there is no strength against evil,' said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. 'But there is strength in it for good.'