Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2023 Update)
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451. “A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

452. “What is life without incompatible realities?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

454. “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

455. “The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

456. “The machine conceals the machinations.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

457. “If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

458. “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

459. “Only what is mortal bears life, Arren. Only in death is there rebirth. The Balance is not a stillness. it is a movement – an eternal becoming.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

460. “It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

464. “To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

465. “The reader can’t take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

466. “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art – the art of words.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

467. “Owning is owing, having is hoarding.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

468. “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

469. “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

470. “In art, ‘good enough’ is not good enough.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

472. “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

473. “I prefer to save talking till I know what I’m talking about.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

474. “You cannot blame everything on the enemy.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

475. “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

476. “To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

477. “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

478. “I’ve got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin’s not easy.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

479. “Alas, I had no power, at that time, to combat the flat refusal of many cover departments to put people of color on a book jacket. So, through many later, lily-white Geds, Ruth Robbins’s painting for the first edition – the fine, strong profile of a young man with copper-brown skin – was, to me, the book’s one true cover.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

480. “In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

481. “Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

482. “The tongue they speak there is not like any spoken in the Archipelago or the other Reaches, and they are a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired, and fierce, liking the sight of blood and the smell of burning towns.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

483. “The admirable is inexplicable.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

484. “Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

485. “Ultimately you write alone.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

486. “Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

487. “All makers must leave room for acts of the spirit.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

488. “Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it’s then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

489. “For the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

490. “Professor Barry Pennywither sat in a cold, shadowy garret and stared at the table in front of him, on which lay a book and a breadcrust. The bread had been his dinner, the book had been his lifework. Both were dry.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

491. “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

492. “That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

493. “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

494. “Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

495. “Ignorant power is a bane!”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

496. “He welcomed isolation with all his heart. It never occurred to him that the reserve he met in Bedap and Tirin might be a response; that his gentle but already formidable hermetic character might form its own ambiance, which only great strength, or great devotion, could withstand. All he noticed, really, was that he had plenty of time to work at last.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

497. “Sometimes one’s very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

498. “Cured?” Goss said. “Would you cure a singer of his voice?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

499. “Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

500. “Then Ged pitied her. She was like a white deer caged, like a white bird wing-clipped, like a silver ring in an old man’s finger.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin