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

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 15 “To the Ice” (p. 220)

“Why should he remember her? Why should she remember him? She had other things to think about. She was a grown woman. She had to face life. Even if all life had to show her was a locked door, and behind the locked door, no room.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Eye of the Heron

Source: The Eye of the Heron (1978), Chapter 2 (p. 30)

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do…”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 4 (The Master Summoner)

“Favoritism, elitism, leader-worship, they crept back and cropped out everywhere. But she had never hoped to see them eradicated in her lifetime, in one generation; only Time works the great changes.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Day Before the Revolution” p. 265 (originally published in Galaxy, August 1974)
Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1974
Hugo nominee for Best Short Story in 1975
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

“Shelley was kicked out of Oxford—I think the story is unauthenticated, but who cares—because he painted a sign on the end wall of a dead-end alley: THIS WAY TO HEAVEN. I feel that every now and then his sign needs repainting.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Introduction to the story “The Field of Vision” p. 222
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

““We may suffer for it when the balance of things rights itself, but we do not lose hope and forego art and forget the words of the Making. Nature is not unnatural. This is not a righting of the balance, but an upsetting of it. There is only one creature who can do that.”
“A man?” Arren said, tentative.
“We men.”
“How?”
“By an unmeasured desire for life.”
“For life? But it isn’t wrong to want to live?”
“No. But when we crave power over life—endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.””

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 3, "Hort Town" (Ged and Arren)

“I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 10 (Ged)

“I forgot, being too interested myself, that he’s a king, and does not see things rationally, but as a king.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 1 “A Parade in Ehrenrang” (p. 17)

“Statesmen remember things selectively.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Other Wind (2001), Chapter 2 “Palaces” (p. 102)

“It seemed, at least, that they had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, City of Illusions (1967), Chapter 8

“There’s seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Other Wind (2001), Chapter 1 “Mending the Green Pitcher” (p. 8)

“To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Question I Get Asked Most Often in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004)

““Why are you always so full of answers?”
“Because life’s so full of questions.””

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Eye of the Heron

Source: The Eye of the Heron (1978), Chapter 2 (p. 26)

“No, I don’t understand him, but he is worth listening to.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 3, "Hort Town"

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Lathe of Heaven

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

“A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.
What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Tombs of Atuan (1971), Chapter 12, "Voyage"

“As we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” p. 255 (originally published in New Dimensions 3, edited by Robert Silverberg)
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

“What's wrong with changing things? Now, I wonder if this self-canceling, centerpoised personality of yours leads you to look at things defensively. I want you to try to detach yourself from yourself and try to see your own viewpoint from the outside, objectively. You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life's not a static object, after all. It's a process. There's no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life-evolution-the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy—existence itself—is essentially change.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Lathe of Heaven

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 9 (Haber)

“The High-Intelligence Life Forms of the planet, of which there were at least three species, all of low technological achievement, they would ignore or enslave or extirpate, whichever was most convenient. For to an aggressive people only technology mattered.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, Rocannon’s World (1966), Chapter 2

“The solution lies in secrecy,” said Medra. “But so does the problem.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Finder” (p. 64)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)