Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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There is not much good spending twelve hours a day in a black hole in the ground all your life long if there’s nothing there, no secret, no treasure, nothing hidden.
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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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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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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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He resolved not to speak again until he had controlled his temper.
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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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... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
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What's to gain by silence?
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So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
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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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One voice, speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time; plenty of time.
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Go to bed; tired is stupid.
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You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing!
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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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'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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Statesmen remember things selectively.
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Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
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If they come prying they can leave curious.
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They had learned how to listen for the sense of the meeting, not the voice of the loudest. They had learned that they must judge each time whether obedience was necessary and right, or misplaced and wrong. They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit’s strength lies in holding fast to the truth.
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To hear, one must be silent.
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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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I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
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They say Mars absolves the warrior from the crimes of war, but those who were not the warriors, those for whom the war was said to be fought, even though they never wanted it to be fought, who absolves them?
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Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.