Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

308. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

310. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

312. “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

313. “The king was pregnant.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

316. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

323. “The writer Moe Bowstern gave me a slogan I cherish: “Subversion Through Friendliness.” It looks silly till you think about it. It bears considerable thinking about. Subversion through terror, shock, pain is easy – instant gratification, as it were.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

325. “In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

345. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

346. “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

347. “Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

348. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

350. “Hold fast to the one noble thing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin