Ursula K. Le Guin: Trending quotes

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Ursula K. Le Guin: 584 quotes22 likes

“Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 8 “Another Way into Orgoreyn” (p. 118)

“I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying. It would be foolish to worry about anything while one died.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book Four Ways to Forgiveness

"A Woman's Liberation", p. 184
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)

“Heal the Wound, Cure the illness, but let the Dying spirit go”

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

“Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

"A Message About Messages" in CBC Magazine https://web.archive.org/web/20051128074549/http://www.cbcbooks.org/cbcmagazine/meet/leguin_ursula_k.html

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

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 5 “The Domestication of Hunch” (p. 55)

“The news had stirred him strangely. He listened for bulletins on the radio, which he had seldom turned on after finding that its basic function was advertising things for sale.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 7 (pp. 201-202)

“And I know that all I understand about living is having your work to do, and being able to do it. That’s the pleasure, and the glory, and all. And if you can’t do the work, or it’s taken from you, then what’s any good? You have to have something….”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, Tehanu (1990), Chapter 8, "Hawks"

“To oppose something is to maintain it.
They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 11 “Soliloquies in Mishnory” (p. 151)

““Do you not understand that I want to give this to you—and to Hain and the other worlds—and to the countries of Urras? But to you all! So that one of you cannot use it, as A-Io wants to do, to get power over the others, to get richer or to win more wars. So that you cannot use the truth for your private profit, but only for the common good.”
“In the end, the truth usually insists upon serving only the common good,” Keng said.
“In the end, yes, but I am not willing to wait for the end. I have one lifetime, and I will not spend it for greed and profiteering and lies. I will not serve any master.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 11 (pp. 345-346)

“This, at least, is the accepted explanation, though like most economic explanations it seems, under certain lights, to omit the main point.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 8 “Another Way into Orgoreyn” (p. 118)

“It always seemed to me they’re sort of alike,” he said, “magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“Darkrose and Diamond” (p. 110)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

“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 Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, Rocannon’s World (1966), Chapter 9

“Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on. Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. […] It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free. Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Dispossessed (1974), Chapter 1 (pp. 1–2)

““She obeys me, but only because she wants to.”
“It’s the only justification for obedience,” Ged observed.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, Tehanu (1990), Chapter 12, "Winter"

“A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, Tehanu (1990), Chapter 8, "Hawks"

“O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn’t then.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Foreward (p. xiii)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

“A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 7 “The Question of Sex” (p. 95)

“Going was easy. Keep on going was hard.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Eye of the Heron

Source: The Eye of the Heron (1978), Chapter 7 (p. 95)

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

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 5 (p. 127)

“She was not so naive as to think there was any necessary relation between religion and morality, or that if there was a relation it was likely to be a benevolent one.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Telling (2000), Ch. 4, §3 (p. 109)