Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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.
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How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn’t saved, isn’t taught?
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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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What was the good working for freedom all your life and ending up without any freedom at all?
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If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
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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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'But now you've come too far, and I warn you, woman! I will not have you set foot on this domain. And if you cross my will or dare so much as speak to me again, I will have you driven from Re Albi, and off the Overfell, with the dogs at your heels. Have you understood me?''No,' Tenar said, 'I have never understood men like you.'
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How could anybody think this man was sick? All right, so he had funny dreams. That was better than being plain mean and hateful, like about one quarter of the people she had ever met.
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You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, "Am I popular?" I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.
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Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.
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'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.'
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The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.
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They prevented men from doing anything. But they did nothing themselves. They did not rule, they only blighted.
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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.
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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.
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The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
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I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
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Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.
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And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life
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The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.
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What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
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'It always seemed to me they’re sort of alike,' he said, 'magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.'
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After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory.
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Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?