Ursula K. Le Guin quotes

Ursula K. Le Guin was an influential American author best known for her works of science fiction and fantasy, including the "Earthsea" series and "The Left Hand of Darkness." Her writing is celebrated for its imaginative worlds, philosophical depth, and exploration of gender and society. She inspired generations of readers and writers with her thought-provoking stories and unique voice. Here are 384 of her quotes:

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.

Ursula K. Le Guin

In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

Ursula K. Le Guin

To hear, one must be silent.

Ursula K. Le Guin

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

Ursula K. Le Guin

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

Ursula K. Le Guin

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

Ursula K. Le Guin

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

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

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

Ursula K. Le Guin

If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

Ursula K. Le Guin

He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.

Ursula K. Le Guin

In art, 'good enough' is not good enough.

Ursula K. Le Guin

It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. 'If it is not, what is' He could not endure those remembered words.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Sure, it's simple, writing for kids. Just as simple as bringing them up.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.

Ursula K. Le Guin

It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.

Ursula K. Le Guin