Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.
-
Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.
-
Those who dislike fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled by science. They don't like either hobbits, or quasars; they don't feel at home with them; they don't want complexities, remoteness. If there is any such connection, I'll bet that it is basically an aesthetic one
-
I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever.
-
'In innocence there is no strength against evil,' said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. 'But there is strength in it for good.'
-
... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
-
All I know is the dark, the night underground. And that’s all there really is. That’s all there is to know, in the end. The silence, and the dark. You know everything, wizard. But I know one thing - the one true thing!
-
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!
-
In the self-important, Falco reflected, there is always room for a little more self-importance.
-
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.
-
A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.
-
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.
-
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
-
As she stumbled forward she cried out in her mind, which was as dark, as shaken as the subterranean vault, 'Forgive me. O my Masters, O unnamed ones, most ancient ones, forgive me, forgive me!'There was no answer. There had never been an answer.
-
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
-
...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.
-
'Why are you always so full of answers?''Because life’s so full of questions.'
-
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.
-
All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
-
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
-
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.
-
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
-
'What harm have the trees done them?' he said. 'Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men.'
-
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.