Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Life in the auntring, or for a settled man, is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

402. “She obeys me, but only because she wants to. It’s the only justification for obedience, Ged observed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

403. “What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

404. “There is no kingdom like the forests.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

405. “Only what is mortal bears life, Arren. Only in death is there rebirth. The Balance is not a stillness. it is a movement – an eternal becoming.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

406. “Our border now is no line between two hills, but the line our planet makes in circling the Sun.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

407. “The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

408. “What is more arrogant than honesty?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

409. “Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

410. “Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

411. “When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

412. “To believe that our beliefs are permanent truths which encompass reality is a sad arrogance. To let go of that belief is to find safety.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

413. “The poet Roethke said, “I learn by going where I have to go.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

414. “When I’m writing I don’t dream much; it’s like the dreaming gets used in the writing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

415. “It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

416. “If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

417. “Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

418. “How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn’t saved, isn’t taught?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

419. “Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

420. “To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

421. “Where, then, is Truth?” declaimed Bedap, and yawned. “In the hill one happens to be sitting on,” said Tirin.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

422. “The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

423. “We weren’t cruel, we were ignorant, foolish. Children are ignorant and foolish. But they learn. If they are given a chance to learn.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

424. “The prisoner is the jailer’s jailer.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

425. “Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

426. “So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

427. “Being an irreligious puritan and a rational mystic, I think it’s irresponsible to let a belief think for you or a chemical dream for you.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

428. “No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

429. “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

430. “I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

431. “It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

432. “Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

433. “I was with you at the beginning of your journey. It is right that I should follow you to its end.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

434. “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

435. “Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

436. “Almost everything is double like that for adolescents; their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall; they see through everything, and are blind.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

437. “If memory remains sound and the thinking mind retains its vigor, an old intelligence may have extraordinary breadth and depth of understanding.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

438. “Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

439. “A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

440. “By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

441. “Had his fear, in fact, been the personal fear that Selver might having learnt the racial hatred, reject him and treat him not as you but as one of them.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

442. “In other ways my story didn’t follow the tradition. Its subversive elements attracted little attention, no doubt because I was deliberately sneaky about them. A great many white readers in 1967 were not ready to accept a brown-skinned hero. But they weren’t expecting one. I didn’t make an issue of it, and you have to be well into the book before you realize that Ged, like most of the characters, isn’t white.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

443. “Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it; it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun’s first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

445. “There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

446. “We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God’s truth, the universe at once began to exist.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

447. “Age and illness made one a dualist.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

448. “Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

449. “It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it’s an easy name to call another man.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

450. “The more defensive a society, the more conformist.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin