Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

“We don’t live in order to die, we live in order to live.”

"A Woman's Liberation", p. 158; first published in Asimov's (1995)
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.”

in an interview http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n12/htdocs/ursula-k-le-guin-440.php?country=uk in Vice Magazine. <br class="br">Context: Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it’s simply meaningless. We don’t live in order to die, we live in order to live.

“Highdrake said that to make love is to unmake power.”

"The Creatures on My Mind" in Unlocking the Air and Other Stories (1996), p. 65

“A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.”

“The Finder” (p. 59)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

“All the mystery and wisdom of the Masters, when it’s out in the daylight, doesn’t amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade—wonderful illusions. But people don’t want to know that. They want the illusions, the mysteries. Who can blame them? There’s so little in life that’s beautiful or worthy.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 18 “On the Ice” (p. 249)

Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes about life

“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.”

“Dragonfly” (p. 199)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

“With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind.”

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 6 (Orr)

“I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that I when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I lived, the breath I breathed.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 10 (p. 333)

“War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to 'a war against' whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might.”

Source: Earthsea Books, The Other Wind (2001), Chapter 5, “Rejoining” (p. 286)

“What would that be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality.”

Afterword to the 2012 edition.
Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)

“We're not outside the world, yoz. You know? We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see?”

"Betrayals", p. 1; first published in Blue Motel (1994)
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)

Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes about the world

“I guess I can't, or my subconscious can't, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you're trying to use, not my rational mind. Maybe rationally I could conceive of the human species not trying to kill each other off by nations, in fact rationally it's easier to conceive of than the motives of war. But you're handling something outside reason. You're trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn't suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?”

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Telling (2000), Ch. 5 (p. 133)

“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “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.”

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 6 (Orr)

““A king has soldiers, servants, messengers, lieutenants. He governs through his servants. Where are the servants of this—Anti-king?”
“In our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live! The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple.””

Section 8
Hainish Cycle, The Word for World Is Forest (1972)

“The First Envoy to a world always comes alone. One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.”

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 9, "Orm Embar" (Arren and Ged)

“She had come to Aka to learn how to sing this world's tune, to dance its dance; and at last, she thought, away from the city's endless noise, she was beginning to hear the music and to learn how to move to it.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 15 “To the Ice” (p. 209)

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

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Telling (2000), Ch. 4, §3 (p. 91)

Ursula K. Le Guin: Trending quotes

“How could anybody think this man was sick? All right, so he had funny dreams. That was better than being plain mean and hateful, like about one quarter of the people she had ever met.”

"The magician" by Maya Jaggi in The Guardian (17 December 2005) http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/childrenandteens/story/0,,1669112,00.html <br class="br">Context: Sometimes one’s very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.

“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 skillful 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.”

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 10 (Heather)

“No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge”

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 8 (p. 247)

Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings.”

"A Man of the People", p. 140
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)
Context: “Lines and colors made with earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All knowledge is local, all truth is partial,” Havzhiva said with an easy, colloquial dignity that he knew was an imitation of his mother, the Heir of the Sun, talking to foreign merchants. “No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger patttern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole."

“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.”

National Book Awards, November 2014 https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/national-book-awards-ursula-le-guin <br class="br">Context: I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river.... The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

“From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.”

Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (1976)

“In innocence there is no strength against evil,” said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. “But there is strength in it for good.”

Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 5

“You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 8, "The Children of the Open Sea"

“To hear, one must be silent.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 2 (p. 55)

“He did not know their songs, and only listened and was borne along on the music, until from up front there came sweeping back wave by wave down the great slow-moving river of people a tune he knew. He lifted his head high and sang it with them, in his own language as he had learned it: the Hymn of the Insurrection. It had been sung in these streets, in this same street, two hundred years ago, by these people, his people.”

Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 2 (Ogion)

“I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but that if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty … to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb.”

Hainish Cycle, (1974)

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Language of the Night

And never under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue. <br class="br"> "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" https://books.google.com/books?id=ksOjjuy3issC&pg=PA44, in The Language of the Night (1979), p. 44

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.”

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

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (Smrtonosné sny)

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Language of the Night

The Language of the Night (1979)
Context: I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to. (There is quite an array of jets, buses and hacks which you can ride to Success; but that is a different destination.) It is a pretty wild country. There are, of course, roads. Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.

“I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Language of the Night

“What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair... Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.”

“True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is.”

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 8, "The Children of the Open Sea" (Ged)

“All knowledge is local, all truth is partial”

"Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction" (1976)
Context: True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero — really look — and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. “You must change your life,” he said. When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

“It is a position, a posture in the dance.”

“The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Telling (2000), Ch. 4, §3 (pp. 90–91)
Context: One of the historians of Darranda said: To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.
A yielding, an obedience, a willingness to accept these notes as the right notes, this pattern as the true pattern, is the essential gesture of performance, translation, and understanding. The gesture need not be permanent, a lasting posture of the mind or heart, yet it is not false. It is more than the suspension of disbelief needed to watch a play, yet less than the conversion. It is a position, a posture in the dance.

“Once you have seen the larger patttern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.”

Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (1976)
Context: The artist deals in 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.

“The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.”

“One of the historians of Darranda said: To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.”

“What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But”

“When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.”

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 8, "The Children of the Open Sea" (Ged)
Context: What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair... Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.

“If civilization has an opposite, it is war.”

“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.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 8 “Another Way into Orgoreyn” (p. 101)

“Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens.”

Introduction (p. xii)
Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

“A great deal of her obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with words and ideas. Nobody had ever taught her to think consecutively. Nobody had ever listened to what she said. All that was expected, all that was wanted of her was muddle, mystery, mumbling. She was a witchwoman. She had nothing to do with clear meaning.”

Introduction to the story “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” p. 166
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

“To see a candle’s light, one must take it into a dark place.”

Source: Earthsea Books, Tehanu (1990), Chapter 5, "Bettering"

“He had assumed that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work—his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy—and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.”

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 9, "Orm Embar" (Sparrowhawk)

“The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 3 (p. 82)

“He looked at the machine, its cabinets all standing open; it should be destroyed, he thought. But he had no idea how to do it, nor any will to try. Destruction was not his line; and a machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.”

“The Finder” (p. 85)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

“Character and training disposed him not to interfere in other mens’s business. His job was to find out what they did, and his inclination was to let them go on doing it. He preferred to be enlightened, rather than to enlighten; to seek facts rather than the Truth. But even the most unmissionary soul, unless he pretend he has no emotions, is sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. “What are they doing?” abruptly becomes, “What are we doing?””

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 10 (Orr)

“Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we knew it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we did not know.”

and then, “What must I do?”
Section 5
Hainish Cycle, The Word for World Is Forest (1972)

“A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.”

Social Dreaming of the Frin in David G. Hartwell (ed.) Year's Best Fantasy 3, p. 172 (Originally published at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magazine_of_Fantasy_%26_Science_Fiction October/November 2002)

“[Shevek] came at last to the long array of doors through which crowds of people came and went constantly, all purposeful, all separate. They all looked, to him, anxious. He had often seen that anxiety before in the faces of Urrasti, and wondered about it. Was it because, no matter how much money they had, they always had to worry about making more, lest they die poor? Was it guilt, because no matter how little money they had, there was always somebody who had less? Whatever the cause, it gave all the faces a certain sameness, and he felt very much alone among them.”

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 7 (Heather)

“Hughes, who had entered the space program from astrophysics, came with a very good record, in fact a brilliant one. This troubled many of his military superiors, to whom high intelligence was a code word for instability and insubordination.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 7 (p. 207)

“Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.”

“The Field of Vision” pp. 228-229 (originally published in Galaxy, October 1973)
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)