Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “For to keep dark the mind of the mageborn, that is a dangerous thing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

305. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

317. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

323. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

325. “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

326. “A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

327. “Alone, no one wins freedom.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

329. “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

330. “As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

331. “I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward. Without mortality to purchase it, how can we have the consciousness of eternity? I think the price is worth paying.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

332. “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

333. “The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

334. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice – the power of change, the essential function of life.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

342. “Progress means nothing to presence.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

343. “She couldn’t be a hero in the hero-tale sense. Not even in a fantasy? No. Because to me, fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

344. “I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

345. “Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

347. “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

348. “We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn’t work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

349. “Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

350. “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