Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

110. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

113. “Ultimately you write alone.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

117. “First sentences are doors to worlds.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “Go to bed; tired is stupid.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

142. “Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

143. “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

144. “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

145. “It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

147. “He was very weary; the day had been long, and full of dragons.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

148. “They made love. Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other’s arms, holding love, asleep.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

150. “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