The Best Ursula Le Guin quotes

What is hard is to keep alive on a world you don’t belong to. — Ursula K. Le Guin

First sentences are doors to worlds. — Ursula K. Le Guin

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? — Ursula K. Le Guin

The world is always new,’ said Coro Mena, ‘however old its roots. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We broke the world to make it whole… — Ursula K. Le Guin

We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night. — Ursula K. Le Guin

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it’s there, and you just reach up and pick it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

I don’t like making the rest of the world live in my dreams, but I certainly don’t want to live in yours. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Truth is a matter of the imagination. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts–only in the truth. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To use the enemy’s weapon is to play the enemy’s game…speak the truth and hear the truth. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Scientific truth will out, you can’t hide the sun under a stone. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half–truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

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

There’s no way to use power for good. — Ursula K. Le Guin

What good is power when you’re too wise to use it? — Ursula K. Le Guin

To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. — Ursula K. Le Guin

But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

As a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing,but does only and wholly what he must do… — Ursula K. Le Guin

The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours. — Ursula K. Le Guin

If women had power what would men be but women who can’t bear children? And what would women be but men who can? — Ursula K. Le Guin

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work–not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To see a candle’s light, one must take it into a dark place. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The light is the left hand of darkness. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light–years away. — Ursula K. Le Guin

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? — Ursula K. Le Guin

It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness … how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself … both and one. A shadow on snow. — Ursula K. Le Guin

You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light. They could not hide you. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way. — Ursula K. Le Guin

What is life without incompatible realities? — Ursula K. Le Guin

You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,’ the mage said…’And life is also a terrible thing,’ Ged said, ‘and must be feared and praised. — Ursula K. Le Guin

They can send death at once, but life is slower… — Ursula K. Le Guin

We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn’t an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Life goes on, even if two–headed and glowing faintly in the dark. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

It is as if i were dead, and this is the after–life, her in the sunlight, beyond the edge of the world, among the sons and daughters of the sea. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life. — Ursula K. Le Guin

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people . — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

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

We’re not outside the world… We are the world. We’re its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don’t say the words, what is their in our world? — Ursula K. Le Guin

Love is the true condition of human life. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

If you see a whole thing–it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Death and life are the same thing–like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same…They can be neither separated, nor mixed. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. — Ursula K. Le Guin

None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience — Ursula K. Le Guin

Very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. — Ursula K. Le Guin

If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty–five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Time is not duration but intensity; time is the beat and the interval […] — Ursula K. Le Guin

One must work with time and not against it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It isn’t changing around from place to place that keeps you lively. It’s getting time on your side. Working with it, not against it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive. — Ursula K. Le Guin

One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention. — Ursula K. Le Guin

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Fiction–and poetry and drama–cleanse the doors of perception. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I don’t write tracts, I write novels. I’m not a preacher, I’m a fiction writer. — Ursula K. Le Guin

When I’m writing I don’t dream much; it’s like the dreaming gets used in the writing. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It’s only a secret to people who don’t want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer. — Ursula K. Le Guin

This writing doesn’t affect reality any more than any writing does; that is to say, indirectly, but considerably. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Sure, it’s simple, writing for kids… Just as simple as bringing them up. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It was the idea of writing with a specific audience in mind or a specific age of reader that scared me off. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The first thing I can remember clearly is writing the way into the secret room. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else — Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin urges authors to remember why they do what they do. Her argument is that writing is an form of art rather than a commodity. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There’s a story that wants to be told. — Ursula K. Le Guin