Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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We read books to find out who we are.
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It always seemed to me they're sort of alike ... magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.
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Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
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The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.
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The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.
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If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
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Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.
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As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
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But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord." "It might to keep it open.
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The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.
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Owning is owing, having is hoarding.
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I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
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You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.
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In art, 'good enough' is not good enough.
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Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?
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We broke the world to make it whole.
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The more defensive a society, the more conformist.
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Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.
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I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
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I know that nobody who hasn't been in battle or under attack can know what war is. But even in terms of being safe at home, it's also true that many Americans who think they know what being at war is, don't. Including, of course, George W. Bush and his people. They don't have a clue.
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First sentences are doors to worlds.
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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.
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The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.
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Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
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We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
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I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
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When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.
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Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind's reach and made a whole again. He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, waisted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it.
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The great authors share their souls with us- "literally.
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Ignorant power is a bane!
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