Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

261. “The admirable is inexplicable.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

262. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

271. “In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

272. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Book Quotes

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

275. “Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

276. “History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

277. “In war everybody is a prisoner.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

278. “I don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn’t a matter of faith, but of evidence.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

279. “There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

280. “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

281. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

282. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

285. “It’s dangerous to confuse self-expression with communication.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

286. “But in time nothing can be without becoming.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

287. “I do not know what makes a man a traitor. No man considers himself a traitor: this makes it hard to find out.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

296. “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

297. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

299. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin