Ursula K. Le Guin quotes - page 2

As a fiction writer, I don't speak message. I speak story. Sure, my story means something, but if you want to know what it means, you have to ask the question in terms appropriate to storytelling. Terms such as message are appropriate to expository writing, didactic writing, and sermons-different languages from fiction. The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
It was men's ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain. View quote
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. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that I 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 lived, the breath I breathed. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
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. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
If they come prying they can leave curious. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
The more defensive a society, the more conformist. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin