Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Success is somebody else’s failure.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

103. “Go to bed; tired is stupid.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

104. “The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

105. “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

106. “The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

107. “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

108. “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

109. “Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

110. “Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom... and that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, when they need it, and that’s always.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

117. “A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

118. “Rules are made to be broken. Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

120. “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

121. “And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

122. “We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

123. “Ultimately you write alone.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

124. “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

125. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

126. “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

127. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes, Country Quotes

128. “Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

129. “What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

136. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

137. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

140. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

144. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

146. “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

147. “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

148. “My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

149. “The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin