Ursula K. Le Guin: Trending quotes (page 3)

“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?””

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

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

Men , Truth , Soul , Business

“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.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

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)

Fear , Dreams

“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?”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

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

World

“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.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Lathe of Heaven

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

God , Time , Parting , Personality

“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.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

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

Life , Way , Thinking , Change

“[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.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

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

Money , People

“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.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Lathe of Heaven

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

Life , Grass , Universe , Parting

“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.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Intelligence

“Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Lathe of Heaven

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 8 (alien)

Fear

“Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Tombs of Atuan (1971), Chapter 11, "The Western Mountains"

World , Dreams

“The game must be played, and played their way, though they made all the rules and had all the skill. His ineptitude did not matter. His honesty did. He was staked now totally on one belief: that an honest man cannot be cheated, that truth, if the game be played through right to the end, will lead to truth.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, City of Illusions (1967), Chapter 7

Truth , Way , Game , Cheating

“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

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

“A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist can’t hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 10 (p. 331)

Truth

“If they come prying they can leave curious.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, Tehanu (1990), Chapter 7, "Mice"

“To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book Four Ways to Forgiveness

"A Man of the People", p. 104; first published in Asimov's (1995)
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)

Change

“All I know is the dark, the night underground. And that’s all there really is. That’s all there is to know, in the end. The silence, and the dark. You know everything, wizard. But I know one thing — the one true thing!”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Tombs of Atuan (1971), Chapter 7, "The Great Treasure" (Arha)

Silence , Night

“What's to gain by silence?”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Cannoc, in Gifts (2004)

Silence

“He knew that 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 book The Lathe of Heaven

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

“All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

People , Thinking , Change , Time

“A man can trust his luck, but a society can’t; and cultural change, like random mutation, may make things chancier. So they have gone very slowly. At any one point in their history a hasty observer would say that all technological progress and diffusion had ceased. Yet it never has. Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 8 “Another Way into Orgoreyn” (p. 98)

History , Change