Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

206. “The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

207. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

209. “I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination. I.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

211. “An owl is mostly air.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

212. “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

213. “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

214. “His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

215. “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

216. “Life rises out of death, death rises out of life, in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

217. “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

218. “The machine conceals the machinations.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

222. “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

223. “Endurance may outlast hope.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

224. “But I, who am old, who have done what I must do, who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know that there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

225. “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

226. “It is our suffering that brings us together.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

227. “Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

229. “O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn’t then.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

230. “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

231. “If civilization has an opposite, it is war.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

232. “A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

233. “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

234. “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

235. “Oh, never and forever aren’t for mortals, love. But we won’t be parted till I know it’s right that we part.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

236. “The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

237. “Housekeeping, the art of the infinite, is no game for amateurs.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

238. “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

239. “I know perfectly well he’s a god, too. But what I think is he’ll be much godlier after he’s dead.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

240. “My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn’t be given, wouldn’t be taken, but chose my man and my fate.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

241. “The novelist’s business is lying.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

242. “At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

243. “Heathen” is merely a word for somebody who knows a different sacredness than you know.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

244. “Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

245. “We demand a rebellious spirit of those who have no chance to learn that rebellion is possible, but we the privileged hold still and see no evil.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

247. “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

248. “Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

249. “Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

250. “We broke the world to make it whole...”

— Ursula K. Le Guin