URSULA K. LE GUIN QUOTES VI

American author (1929- )


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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
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interview, Salon, November 17, 2014


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People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

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

Tags: dragons


A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Tehanu


Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

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


Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

Tags: fear


Nothing succeeds like success.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness


Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven


Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness

Tags: prophecy


When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013

Tags: poetry


It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed


A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Word for World is Forest

Tags: realism


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

Tags: power


Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Telling

Tags: civilization


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

Tags: pain


To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Tales from Earthsea

Tags: silence


Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

Tags: revolution


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

Tags: sleep


The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven


Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

Tags: suffering


Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness