Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them, all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal?-What is it but death-death without rebirth?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

452. “Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

453. “In other ways my story didn’t follow the tradition. Its subversive elements attracted little attention, no doubt because I was deliberately sneaky about them. A great many white readers in 1967 were not ready to accept a brown-skinned hero. But they weren’t expecting one. I didn’t make an issue of it, and you have to be well into the book before you realize that Ged, like most of the characters, isn’t white.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

454. “Lord Berosty rem ir Ipe came to Thangering Fastness and offered forty beryls and half the year’s yield from his orchards as the price of a Foretelling, and the price was acceptable. He set his question to the Weaver Odren, and the question was, On what day shall I die?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

455. “All her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

456. “There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

457. “Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

458. “There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

459. “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.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

460. “Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

461. “You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes – the walls, the walls!”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

462. “Oh Lavinia, Lavinia, you are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

463. “They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned. They were intelligent, their minds were already disciplined to the clarity of science, and they were sixteen years old. But at this point the pleasure of the argument ceased for Shevek, as it had earlier for Kvetur. He was disturbed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

464. “So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

465. “You have not thought things through,” he said. By his standards it was a brutal insult.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

466. “What is his purpose, then?” “I don’t know. Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

467. “Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then. I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

468. “All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

469. “The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

470. “Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

471. “There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no act or art or power can teach me, what I have never learned.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

472. “They exist. But they are not your Masters. They never were. You are free, Tenar. You were taught to be a slave, but you have broken free.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

473. “What is life without incompatible realities?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

474. “Manipulated, one manipulates others.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

475. “If they come prying they can leave curious.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

476. “The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

477. “I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

478. “Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

479. “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.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

480. “I don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn’t a matter of faith, but of evidence.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

481. “The first thing I can remember clearly is writing the way into the secret room.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

482. “To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

483. “There’s seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

484. “We cried “Sisterhood is powerful!” – and they believed us. Terrified misogynists of both sexes were howling that the house was burning down before most feminists found out where the matches were.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

485. “Dreams take short cuts.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

486. “Old age isn’t a state of mind. It’s an existential situation.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

487. “As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

488. “Meaning in art isn’t the same as meaning in science. The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isn’t changed by who reads it, or when, or where. The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

489. “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

490. “Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I’m sorry. When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

491. “Not all roads that lead down lead up as well.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

492. “He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

493. “By and large books are mankind’s best invention.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

494. “We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

495. “Orr was not a fast reasoner. In fact, he was not a reasoner. He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

496. “All Galileo said, all Darwin said, was, “It doesn’t have to be the way we thought it was.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

497. “An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap-works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn’t work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

498. “The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

499. “The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful the life is, is from the vantage point of death.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

500. “But I know him, Moss. It’s Sparrowhawk.” Saying the name, Ged’s use-name, released a tenderness in her, so that for the first time she thought and felt that this was he indeed, and that all the years since she had first seen him were their bond. She saw a light like a star in darkness, underground, long ago, and his face in the light.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin