"Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Lathe of Heaven)

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

"We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel...is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas)

"It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"Belief is the wound that knowledge heals."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Telling)

"The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.

—The Creation of Éa"
— Ursula K. LeGuin (A Wizard of Earthsea)

"People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within. "
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"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."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Farthest Shore)

"When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places)

"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. LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness)

"Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Tombs of Atuan)

"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. LeGuin

"Truth is a matter of the imagination."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness)

"Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"When I'm writing I don't dream much; it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"'The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.'"
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Farthest Shore)

"Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way. "
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Farthest Shore)

"If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then the next day you probably do much the same again—if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time....

[T]he proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us."

—"The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction"
— Ursula K. LeGuin (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places)

"I doubt the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, that child would grow up to be an eggplant."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (A Wizard of Earthsea)

"There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

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

"It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (A Wizard of Earthsea)

"I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.'"
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"To see that you life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (Gifts)

"Do you see how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls, the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth an light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale's sounding to the fall of a dry leaf an the gnat's flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole.

But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Farthest Shore)

"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. LeGuin

"For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"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. LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness)

"If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places)

"They have nothing to give. They have no power of making. All their power is to darken and destroy. They cannot leave this place; they are this place; and it should be left to them. They should not be denied nor forgotten, but neither should they be worshiped. The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes. And where men worship these things and abase themselves before them, there evil breeds; there places are made in the world where darkness gathers, places given over wholly to the Ones whom we call Nameless, the ancient and holy Powers of the Earth before the Light, the powers of the dark, of ruin, of madness… I think they drove your priestess Kossil mad a long time ago; I think she has prowled these caverns as she prowls the labyrinth of her own self, and now she cannot see the daylight any more. She tells you that the Nameless Ones are dead; only a lost soul, lost to truth, could believe that. They exist. But they are not your Masters. They never were. You are free, Tenar. You were taught to be a slave, but you have broken free."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Tombs of Atuan)

"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."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness)

"What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice." From the short story "the Day before the Revolution."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Wind's Twelve Quarters: Volume 1)

"In war everybody is a prisoner."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories)

"We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"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. LeGuin (The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction)

"...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness)

"And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life—"
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)