Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

152. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

155. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

170. “In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

172. “My Real Children starts quietly, then suddenly takes you on two roller-coaster rides at once, swooping dizzily through a double panorama and ending in a sort of super Sophie’s Choice. A daring tour de force.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

174. “An owl is mostly air.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

175. “It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

176. “Like all walls it was ambiguous, two faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side you were on.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

177. “Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

178. “I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

179. “The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

180. “When all ways are lost the way is clear.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

181. “The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

182. “Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

183. “What can I recommend? Trust your story; trust yourself; trust your readers – but wisely. Trust watchfully, not blindly. Trust flexibly, not rigidly. The whole thing, writing a story, is a high-wire act – there you are out in midair walking on a spiderweb line of words, and down in the darkness people are watching. What can you trust but your sense of balance?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

184. “I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There’s a story that wants to be told.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

185. “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

186. “Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

187. “But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

189. “George, it’s impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

190. “Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. 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.” And.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

191. “Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

192. “The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

193. “The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

194. “All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

195. “In war everybody is a prisoner.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

197. “Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

198. “I don’t want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It’s just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

200. “As a writer, you are free.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin