Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “The admirable is inexplicable.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

253. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

256. “In war everybody is a prisoner.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

257. “The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isn’t the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

258. “The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

261. “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

262. “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

263. “To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

264. “Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art – the art of words.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

265. “As a writer, you are free.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

266. “The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

267. “Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a fury in a cage. He had no right to tease them. They knew no relation but possession. They were possessed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

268. “What it has to do is move – end up in a different place from where it started. That’s what narrative does. It goes. It moves. Story is change.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

269. “But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

270. “Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work. The judgment that a work is complete – this is what I meant to do, and I stand by it – can come only from the writer, and it can be made rightly only by a writer who’s learned to read her own work.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

279. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

281. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

288. “What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

295. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

297. “The king was pregnant.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

298. “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

299. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin