American author (1929- )
Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
City of Illusions
It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tehanu
To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"A Man of the People", Four Ways to Forgiveness
Violence gains nothing, killing wins nothing -- only sometimes nothing is what people want. Death is what they want. And they get it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"The Eye of the Heron"
He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence. He did not see the connections, which is said to be the hallmark of intellect. He felt connections--like a plumber.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
The more defensive a society, the more conformist.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
City of Illusions
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tales from Earthsea
It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. or wonder who, after all, you are.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
I'm not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I don't really think there is one answer, so I never went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful. I like trying on ideas and ways of life and religious approaches. I'm just not a good candidate for conversion.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life--evolution--the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy--existence itself--is essentially change.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Telling