Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2023 Update)
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51. “Truth is a matter of the imagination.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

52. “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

53. “The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

55. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

62. “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

63. “Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

65. “Greed puts out the sun.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “I write with all my heart.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

73. “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

74. “One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies...”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

75. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

77. “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

78. “I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn’t all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

80. “Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

81. “There’s a great fear of the imagination. It’s a dangerous thing. It’s out of control, it’s subversive.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

86. “Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

87. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

89. “The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

90. “Success is somebody else’s failure.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

91. “Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

96. “To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

97. “The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

98. “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

99. “Men who fight wars in winter don’t live till spring.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

100. “The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin