Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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Hughes, who had entered the space program from astrophysics, came with a very good record, in fact a brilliant one. This troubled many of his military superiors, to whom high intelligence was a code word for instability and insubordination.
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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 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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All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
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Armed men don’t sit down and talk.
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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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'The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.''Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical.'
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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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What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the greatest revolution of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens.
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'Why are you always so full of answers?''Because life’s so full of questions.'
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Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.
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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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'We're not outside the world, yoz. You know? We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see?'
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Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
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Men who fight wars in Winter don’t live till Spring.
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'Well,' he said. 'Strange roads have strange guides. Let’s go on.'
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He liked the vast openness of sky and prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so immense a domain to be alone in.
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'Summon up a supper,' he said. 'Oh, I could. On golden plates, if you like. But that’s illusion, and when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.'
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It seemed, at least, that they had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
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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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If they come prying they can leave curious.
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Grow up. Grow up. Time to grow up. You’re here now. We’re working on physics here, not religion. Drop the mysticism and grow up.
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She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.