Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

404. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

407. “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

408. “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

409. “Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

410. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

413. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

425. “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

426. “To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution.”

— 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. “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

429. “A lot of snow out of one cloud, and it grows thicker.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

435. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

437. “The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

438. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

440. “Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them, all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal?-What is it but death-death without rebirth?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

441. “He listened to the radio, but it would not listen to him. He was all alone, and nothing seemed to be real in solitude. He needed somebody, anybody, to talk to, he had to tell them what he felt so that he knew if he felt anything.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

442. “Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

443. “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

444. “All her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

445. “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

446. “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

447. “You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes – the walls, the walls!”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

448. “I’m not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I don’t really think there is one answer, so I never went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful. I like trying on ideas and ways of life and religious approaches. I’m just not a good candidate for conversion.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

449. “Lord Berosty rem ir Ipe came to Thangering Fastness and offered forty beryls and half the year’s yield from his orchards as the price of a Foretelling, and the price was acceptable. He set his question to the Weaver Odren, and the question was, On what day shall I die?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

450. “They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned. They were intelligent, their minds were already disciplined to the clarity of science, and they were sixteen years old. But at this point the pleasure of the argument ceased for Shevek, as it had earlier for Kvetur. He was disturbed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin