URSULA K. LE GUIN QUOTES V

American author (1929- )


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One swallow does not make a summer.

URSULA K. LE GUIN
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The Lathe of Heaven


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Tags: summer


No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

Tags: patriotism


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


O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

foreward, Tales from Earthsea

Tags: present


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

Tags: action


Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life’s over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

"The Space Crone", Co-Evolution Quarterly, summer 1976

Tags: Ursula K. Le Guin


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"


Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013

Tags: realism


Men are afraid of virgins, but they have a cure for their own fear and the virgin's virginity.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

"The Space Crone", Co-Evolution Quarterly, summer 1976


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

Tags: choice


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 more defensive a society, the more conformist.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

City of Illusions


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

Tags: religion


Go to bed; tired is stupid.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

A Wizard of Earthsea

Tags: sleep


Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, Salon, November 17, 2014


Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

URSULA K. LE GUIN

A Wizard of Earthsea

Tags: power


For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination


To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Guardian, December 17, 2005

Tags: art


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

Tags: fantasy


Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

Tags: physics