Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

452. “It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it’s an easy name to call another man.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

453. “So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

454. “True understanding is the spur of genius.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

455. “By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

456. “The more defensive a society, the more conformist.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

457. “A lot of snow out of one cloud, and it grows thicker.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

458. “The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

461. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

463. “Age and illness made one a dualist.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

464. “It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

465. “I was with you at the beginning of your journey. It is right that I should follow you to its end.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

466. “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

467. “Almost everything is double like that for adolescents; their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall; they see through everything, and are blind.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

468. “I’m not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I don’t really think there is one answer, so I never went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful. I like trying on ideas and ways of life and religious approaches. I’m just not a good candidate for conversion.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

469. “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

470. “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

471. “He listened to the radio, but it would not listen to him. He was all alone, and nothing seemed to be real in solitude. He needed somebody, anybody, to talk to, he had to tell them what he felt so that he knew if he felt anything.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

472. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

473. “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

474. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

475. “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

476. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Book Quotes

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

485. “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

486. “What is life without incompatible realities?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

487. “Manipulated, one manipulates others.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

490. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Book Quotes

492. “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

493. “Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes...”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

494. “Dreams take short cuts.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

498. “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

499. “Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

500. “The Owl thinks slowly, but the Owl thinks long.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin