Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

104. “In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

105. “Peace above all, until the War comes...”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

106. “It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

107. “Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can’t understand that they end in him, but they don’t end with him.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

108. “Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain’t no free rides, baby.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

110. “If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

111. “A library is a focal point, a sacred place to a community; and its sacredness is its accessibility, its publicness. It’s everybody’s place”.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

112. “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

113. “They can send death at once, but life is slower...”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

114. “If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

115. “Let age be age. Let your old relative or old friend be who they are. Denial serves nothing, no one, no purpose.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

116. “There are dance artists, painting artists and writing artists. Authors are writing artists. You can practice art in whatever medium you choose, and words are mine.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

117. “Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

118. “A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer’s job is to be its medium.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

119. “Would you walk away from Omelas?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

121. “All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that’s the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it’s life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

122. “Where there’s property, there’s theft.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

123. “Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

124. “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

125. “Who knows a man’s name, holds that man’s life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

127. “To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

128. “To see a candle’s light one must take it into a dark place.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

129. “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

130. “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

131. “If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

132. “Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

133. “Scientific truth will out, you can’t hide the sun under a stone.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

134. “All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

135. “As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep. I was not sleepy, yet. I would go east to the Fastnesses, and gather information from the Foretellers, perhaps.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

136. “Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

137. “What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

138. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

140. “No society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

141. “Encender una vela es proyectar una sombra...”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

142. “Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

143. “I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

144. “Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it’s simply meaningless. We don’t live in order to die, we live in order to live.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

145. “The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

146. “Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

147. “A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

148. “Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

149. “Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

150. “The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin