Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “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

252. “It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

253. “For to keep dark the mind of the mageborn, that is a dangerous thing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

254. “Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom... and that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, when they need it, and that’s always.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

255. “You have to help another person. But it’s not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you’re doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

256. “The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

257. “Love’s just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don’t have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

258. “I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

259. “That is between me and my shadow.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

260. “And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn’t know where I was at all.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

261. “He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

262. “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

264. “What is the sense of giving a boundary to all... of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

265. “To light a candle is to cast a shadow...”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

266. “No matter how intelligent a man is, he can’t see what he doesn’t know how to see.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

267. “In diversity is life and where there’s life there’s hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

269. “A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

270. “The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

271. “I am offered the Grand Inquisitor’s choice. Will you choose freedom without happiness, or happiness without freedom? The only answer one can make, I think, is: No.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

272. “I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

273. “Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

275. “We sleep researchers like cats, you know; they sleep a lot!”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

276. “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

277. “And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

278. “The wise needn’t ask, the fool asks in vain.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

279. “Alone, no one wins freedom.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

280. “In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

281. “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

282. “The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human. We.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

283. “I was dying of thirst when you gave me water, yet it was not the water alone that saved me. It was the strength of the hands that gave it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

285. “She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

286. “Progress means nothing to presence.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

289. “He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

290. “A rock is a good thing, too, you know. If the Isles of Earthsea were all made of diamond, we’d lead a hard life here. Enjoy the illusions, lad, and let the rocks be rocks.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

291. “Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

292. “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

293. “Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

294. “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

295. “Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

296. “Are there really people without resentment, without hate? she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

297. “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

298. “The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

299. “To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

300. “Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin