Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

52. “Those who build walls are their own prisoners.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

53. “The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

54. “You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

55. “No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

56. “All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people .”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

57. “I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

58. “Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

59. “If you’re a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don’t censor, don’t control. Listen, and write.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

60. “Greed puts out the sun.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

61. “The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

62. “Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

63. “It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

64. “What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

65. “Paradise is for those who make paradise.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

66. “Would you walk away from Omelas?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

67. “It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

68. “Not even need and love can defeat fate...”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

69. “I write with all my heart.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

70. “What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

71. “I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

72. “Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

73. “To oppose something is to maintain it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

74. “To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

75. “The notion that fantasy is only for the immature rises from an obstinate misunderstanding of both maturity and the imagination.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

76. “Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

77. “Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

78. “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

79. “First sentences are doors to worlds.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

80. “To find a new world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

81. “I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn’t it what all the great wars and battles are fought for – so that at day’s end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

82. “We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

83. “See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

84. “When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

85. “The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one’s true identity in both.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

86. “This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

87. “The trouble is, women have to be absolutely first class to get where third-class men get.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

88. “Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

89. “The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

90. “The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

91. “The light is the left hand of darkness.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

92. “To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

93. “Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

94. “The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

95. “Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art – the art of words.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

96. “And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

97. “The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

98. “Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

99. “You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

100. “A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin