Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

154. “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

155. “If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

158. “Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

164. “The tree said in its rooted being, “All my leaves are seen, but one, this one in the darkness cast by all the others. This one leaf I keep secret to myself. Who will see it in the darkness of my leaves? And who will count the number of them?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

168. “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

169. “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

170. “For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

171. “After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

172. “Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

173. “Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

176. “I wrote an essay about the rhythm of Tolkien’s writing in The Lord of the Rings. Short rhythms repeated form long rhythms; there’s a cyclical repetition in his work which I think is part of why it totally enchants so many of us. We are caught in this rhythm and are happy there.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

177. “The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

178. “What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make; I can only undo, unmake.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

179. “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

180. “A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They’d rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

181. “Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn’t taking place.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

182. “The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

183. “Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

184. “Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

185. “If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It’s only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

186. “Rid yourself from the idea of earning, the idea of deserving, and you will be able to think.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

187. “A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

188. “I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after ‘semicolons,’ and another one after ’now.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

189. “What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

190. “Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

191. “At the pit’s bottom is no anger.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

192. “You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light. They could not hide you.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

193. “The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

194. “Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

195. “Dragons think we are amusing. But they remember Erreth-Akbe. They speak of him as if he were a dragon, not a man.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

196. “The world is always new,” said Coro Mena, “however old its roots.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

197. “I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

198. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

199. “It is useless work that darkens the heart.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

200. “Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin