quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

"Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."
— Ursula K. Le Guin

"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. Le Guin (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas)

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

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

"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. Le Guin

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

"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. Le Guin (The Farthest Shore)

"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. Le Guin (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. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness)

"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. Le Guin

"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. Le Guin (The Tombs of Atuan)

"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. Le Guin (A Wizard of Earthsea)

"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. Le Guin (The Farthest Shore)

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

"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. Le Guin (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. Le Guin

"Nobody who says, "I told you so" has ever been, or will ever be, a hero."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Language Of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction)

"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. Le Guin (A Wizard of Earthsea)

"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. Le Guin

"...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. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness)