Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

202. “For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it’s true. Children know that. Adults know it too and that’s precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

203. “To see a candle’s light, one must take it into a dark place. This is the same as to see the good and be grateful, one must compare and contrast it with something worse – not better!”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

204. “Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

205. “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

206. “Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however – that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

207. “Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

208. “All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

209. “It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

210. “The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

211. “If you can’t lick’em, join’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

212. “A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

214. “To deny the past is to deny the future. A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

215. “It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

216. “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

217. “The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

218. “Go to bed; tired is stupid.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

219. “Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

220. “To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

221. “Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

223. “Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

224. “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

225. “Those who dislike fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled by science. They don’t like either hobbits, or quasars; they don’t feel at home with them; they don’t want complexities, remoteness. If there is any such connection, I’ll bet that it is basically an aesthetic one.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

226. “A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

227. “But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

228. “Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

229. “In innocence there is no strength against evil, said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. But there is strength in it for good.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

230. “Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

231. “Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

232. “First sentences are doors to worlds.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

233. “The backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

234. “The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

235. “The king was pregnant.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

236. “You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

237. “The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

238. “When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

239. “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

240. “To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

241. “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

242. “But belief is the wound that knowledge heals, and death begins the Telling of our life.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

243. “Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

244. “Do you realise,’ the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, ‘that they couldn’t even read Eggplant?’ And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike’s Peak.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

245. “Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

246. “The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

247. “They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. But I will not believe that. I want the walls down. I want solidarity, human solidarity.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

248. “You don’t speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

249. “When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

250. “For if it’s all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it’s himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin