Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

205. “An owl is mostly air.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

217. “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

218. “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

219. “Endurance may outlast hope.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

222. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

224. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “The machine conceals the machinations.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

230. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

240. “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

241. “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

242. “On the dock Yarrow stood and watched them go, as sailors’ wives and sisters stand on all the shores of all Earthsea watching their men go out on the sea, and they do not wave or call aloud, but stand still in hooded cloak of grey or brown, there on the shore that dwindles smaller and smaller from the boat while the water grows wide between.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

244. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

246. “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

247. “The admirable is inexplicable.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

249. “Owning is owing, having is hoarding.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

250. “In art, ‘good enough’ is not good enough.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin