Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The creative adult is the child who has survived.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Creativity Quotes

2. “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Sweet Quotes, Love Life Quotes, Caring Quotes, Love You Quotes, Romantic Quotes

3. “No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Good Night Quotes

4. “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

5. “The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

6. “Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

7. “When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

8. “I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

9. “We read books to find out who we are.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Quotes About Books And Reading, Focus On Yourself Quotes, Identity Quotes, Storytelling Quotes, Book Quotes

10. “The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

11. “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.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Meaning of Life Quotes, Healing Quotes

12. “To hear, one must be silent.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

13. “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

14. “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

15. “Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

16. “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

17. “My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

18. “We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

19. “One must work with time and not against it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

20. “People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

21. “There are no right answers to wrong questions.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

22. “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

23. “Fiction – and poetry and drama – cleanse the doors of perception.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

24. “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

25. “All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

26. “To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

27. “The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

28. “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

29. “Well, the secret to writing is writing. It’s only a secret to people who don’t want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

30. “When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

31. “We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

32. “We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

33. “I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

34. “My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

35. “Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

36. “Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn’t know they knew.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

37. “If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

38. “Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

39. “Truth is a matter of the imagination.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

40. “There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

41. “But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

42. “The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

43. “The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

44. “Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

45. “What good is power when you’re too wise to use it?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

46. “Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Real Quotes

47. “Besides, when you say you’re a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it’s kind of irresistible.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

48. “The story is not in the plot but in the telling.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

49. “Sometimes you must go against the wheel’s turn.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

50. “Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin