American author (1929- )
Sometimes a god comes.... He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tales from Earthsea
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness
Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
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
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness
There are souls ... whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never get weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
The anthropologist cannot always leave his own shadow out of the picture he draws.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my career--my agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I could send her an utterly indescribable story, and she'd sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorker--she knew where to take it. She never told me what to write or not write, she never told me, That won't sell, and she never meddled with my prose.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013