Welcome to our collection of quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Wikipedia Summary for Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. She was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a "major voice in American Letters". Le Guin herself said she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist".
Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, to author Theodora Kroeber and anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber. Having earned a master's degree in French, Le Guin began doctoral studies but abandoned these after her marriage in 1953 to historian Charles Le Guin. She began writing full-time in the late 1950s and achieved major critical and commercial success with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which have been described by Harold Bloom as her masterpieces. For the latter volume, Le Guin won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, becoming the first woman to do so. Several more works set in Earthsea or the Hainish universe followed; others included books set in the fictional country of Orsinia, several works for children, and many anthologies.
Cultural anthropology, Taoism, feminism, and the writings of Carl Jung all had a strong influence on Le Guin's work. Many of her stories used anthropologists or cultural observers as protagonists, and Taoist ideas about balance and equilibrium have been identified in several writings. Le Guin often subverted typical speculative fiction tropes, such as through her use of dark-skinned protagonists in Earthsea, and also used unusual stylistic or structural devices in books such as the experimental work Always Coming Home (1985). Social and political themes, including race, gender, sexuality, and coming of age were prominent in her writing, and she explored alternative political structures in many stories, such as in the parable "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973) and the utopian novel The Dispossessed (1974).
Le Guin's writing was enormously influential in the field of speculative fiction, and has been the subject of intense critical attention. She received numerous accolades, including eight Hugos, six Nebulas, and twenty-two Locus Awards, and in 2003 became the second woman honored as a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The U.S. Library of Congress named her a Living Legend in 2000, and in 2014, she won the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Le Guin influenced many other authors, including Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, and Iain Banks. After her death in 2018, critic John Clute wrote that Le Guin had "presided over American science fiction for nearly half a century", while author Michael Chabon referred to her as the "greatest American writer of her generation".
Ai taught me a Terran game played on squares with little stones, called go, an excellent difficult game.
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.
Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.
Longer Version:
Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.... Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.... Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.
Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
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.
Sure, it's simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.
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.
I want the story to have a rhythm that keeps moving forward. Because that's the whole point of telling a story. You're on a journey -- you're going from here to there. It's got to move. Ursula K.
Shoot for the top, always. You know you'll never make it, but what's the fun if you don't shoot for the top? Ursula K.
The thing about working with time, instead of against it, …is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts. Ursula K.
If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly. Ursula K.
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. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it. Ursula K.
It is our suffering that brings us together.
Longer Version:
It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood.
The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. Ursula K.
Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom. Ursula K.
One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience. Ursula K.
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice. Ursula K.
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.
I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'
George Orr stayed in Portland because he had always lived there and because he had no reason to believe that life anywhere else would be better, or different.
To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
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.
Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
So long as people were free to choose, if they chose to drink flybane and live in sewers, it was their business. Just so long as it wasn't the business of Business, the source of profit and the means of power for other people.
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.
What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
Students are intense people, they laugh and cry, they break down and rebuild.
The child stared at her or at nothing, trying to breathe, and trying again to breathe, and trying again to breathe.
Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
What is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry?
I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
Takver looked at him with mistrustful curiosity. She was four years old. She had a round head, a round face. She was round.
Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.
Everything is old, here. We are old -- the Masters.
You're not, Irian said. She thought him between thirty and forty...
But I came far. Miles can be years.
His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.
He had made follow him. He had called her by her name, and she had come crouching to his hand.
What they feared was what they didn't know, what they clung to was what they knew.
So honest conversation about concerning geezerhood takes place mostly among geezers.
Unfair as it may be, nothing guarantees health to the old. Bodies wear out...despite the most careful maintenance.
Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along.
There's a saying, Aeneas said: Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts. He spoke wryly. Horses, particularly.
This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?'
...'Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels.
After a pause she said, I see your magic is not good only for large things.
Hospitality, he said, kindness to a stranger, that's a very large thing.
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.
Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.
I was with you at the beginning of your journey. It is right that I should follow you to its end.
She obeys me, but only because she wants to. It's the only justification for obedience, Ged observed.
'Banished men should never speak their native tongue; it comes bitter from their mouth. And this language suits a traitor better, I think; drips off one's teeth like sugar-syrup.'
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!
Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.
I had of course met with incredulity..., but seldom with a will to incredulity.
Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had.
Oh, you're here already, she said, taken by surprise and feeling unready, incompetent, old, as she always felt with other people. Alone, she only felt old when she was overtired or ill. Maybe living alone was the right thing for her after all.
Honestly, orthodoxy concerns me about as much as it concerns your average jackrabbit. I only follow rules that take me where I want to go. If there aren't any rules, I make up my own and follow them strictly.
As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.
What it has to do is move -- end up in a different place from where it started. That's what narrative does. It goes. It moves. Story is change.
I learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence.
I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write.
Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?
He also had a kind of helpless politeness, which I took advantage of. He was quite incapable of refusing a direct request, and so, because I asked him to, he invited me to several parties during the month I stayed in Hemgogn.
Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
There are a whole lot of ways to be perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment.
When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.
The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.
Longer Version:
The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography. For the ultimate selling job on ultimate violence one must read those works of fiction issued by our government as manuals of civil defense, in which you learn that there's nothing to be afraid of if you've stockpiled lots of dried fruit.
There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration.
A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.
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.
The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.
I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.
Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin are featured in:
Courage Quotes
Depression Quotes
Hope Quotes
Forest Quotes
Paradise Quotes
Love Quotes