Ursula K. Le Guin: Trending quotes (page 10)

“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.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Life , War , World

“By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Telling (2000), Ch. 5 (p. 123)

Religion , Law , Dead

“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.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Love , Life , World , Thinking

“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

“The Bones of the Earth” (p. 138)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

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

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

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

World

“Nobody had made this wilderness, and there was no evil in it and no good; it simply was.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Eye of the Heron

Source: The Eye of the Heron (1978), Chapter 11 (p. 162)

Evil

“One man may as easily destroy, as govern: be King or Anti-King.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

““The politics of reality,” Shevek repeated. He looked at Oiie and said, “That is a curious phrase for a physicist to use.”
“Not at all. The politician and the physicist both deal with things as they are, with real forces, the basic laws of the world.”
“You put your petty miserable ‘laws’ to protect wealth, your ‘forces’ of guns and bombs, in the same sentence with the law of entropy and the force of gravity? I had thought better of your mind, Demaere!””

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 7 (p. 203)

World , Law , Reality , Wealth

“Grow up. Grow up. Time to grow up. You’re here now. We’re working on physics here, not religion. Drop the mysticism and grow up.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 4 (p. 104)

Religion , Time

“The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book Four Ways to Forgiveness

"A Man of the People", p. 107
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)

Knowledge , Sense

“They say Mars absolves the warrior from the crimes of war, but those who were not the warriors, those for whom the war was said to be fought, even though they never wanted it to be fought, who absolves them?”

Ursula K. Le Guin book Lavinia

Source: Lavinia (2008), p. 177

War

“No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Stars Below” p. 204 (originally published in Orbit 14, edited by Damon Knight)
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

“He felt that sense of being necessary which is the burden and reward of parenthood.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 8 (p. 248)

Sense

“After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Day Before the Revolution” p. 270 (originally published in Galaxy, August 1974)
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

Hope , Victory

“And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 19 “Homecoming” (p. 279)

Love , Time , Loyalty , Country

“One voice, speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time; plenty of time.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 3 “The Mad King” (p. 27)

Truth , Time

““Is it a wicked thing, then?”
“I should call it a misunderstanding, rather. A misunderstanding of life. Death and life are the same thing—like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same… They can be neither separated, nor mixed.””

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 5, "Sea Dreams" (Arren and Ged)

Life , Death

“If I don’t speak truth I can’t seek truth.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Eye of the Heron

Source: The Eye of the Heron (1978), Chapter 5 (p. 77)

Truth

“It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 3 (p. 72)

Communication , Idea , Nature , Light

“Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 5 (p. 149)