Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we knew it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we did not know.
-
'The solution lies in secrecy,' said Medra. 'But so does the problem.'
-
Before the gods and after, always, are the streams. Caves, stones, hills. Trees. The earth. The darkness of the earth.
-
It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.
-
I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
-
I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
-
That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
-
Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.
-
Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.
-
'Is it different, then, for men and for women?''What isn’t, dearie?'
-
The juniper-scented liquor had volatilized his thoughts; he should be thinking that madness caused this man to call himself a king, but was thinking rather that kingship had driven this man mad.
-
'For a word to be spoken,' Ged answered slowly, 'there must be silence. Before, and after.' Then all at once he got up, saying, 'I have no right to speak of these things. The word that was mine to say I said wrong. It is better that I keep still; I will not speak again. Maybe there is no true power but the dark.'
-
The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both.
-
The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We can’t stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.
-
He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.
-
Her left hand reminded her of its existence, and she looked round to see what was scratching the heel of her hand. It was a tiny thistle, crouched in a crack in the sandstone, barely lifting its colorless spikes into the light and wind. It nodded stiffly as the wind blew, resisting the wind, rooted in rock. She gazed at it for a long time.
-
It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
-
A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer's job is to be its medium.
-
He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
-
The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars.
-
After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory.
-
The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
-
The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.
-
Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.