Ursula K. Le Guin quotes - page 3

Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol twisted aside, and the lie come to be. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
Manipulated, one manipulates others. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
There's no way to use power for good. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever. View quote
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. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond? View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
There's a point, around age twenty,” Bedap said, "when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
It is not human to be without shame and without desire. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
What is more arrogant than honesty? View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself-as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation-you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
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. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin