Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
'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?'
-
Those were men in whom great strength and knowledge served the will to evil and fed upon it. Whether the wizardry that serves a better end may always prove the stronger, we do not know. We hope.
-
'Well,' he said. 'Strange roads have strange guides. Let’s go on.'
-
All the mystery and wisdom of the Masters, when it’s out in the daylight, doesn’t amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade-wonderful illusions. But people don’t want to know that. They want the illusions, the mysteries. Who can blame them? There’s so little in life that’s beautiful or worthy.
-
Maybe that’s what the Masters are afraid of. Maybe celibacy isn’t as necessary as the Rule of Roke teaches. Maybe it’s not a way of keeping the power pure, but of keeping the power to themselves.
-
No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty.
-
'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.'
-
If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
-
The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel.
-
It seemed, at least, that they had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
-
Armed men don’t sit down and talk.
-
She saw time naively as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.
-
I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
-
There’s no way to use power for good.
-
We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.
-
'The first lesson on Roke, and the last is, Do what is needful! And no more.''The lessons in between, then, must consist in learning what is needful.''They do.'
-
The First Envoy to a world always comes alone. One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.
-
Men who fight wars in Winter don’t live till Spring.
-
What is a woman's power then?" she asked. "I don't think we know." "When has a woman power because she's a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while..." "In her house, maybe." She looked around the kitchen. "But the doors are shut," she said, "the doors are locked." "Because you're valuable." "Oh yes. We're precious. So long as we're powerless.
-
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?
-
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.
-
He liked the vast openness of sky and prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so immense a domain to be alone in.
-
I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
-
I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.