Ursula K. Le Guin: Trending quotes (page 5)

“How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn’t saved, isn’t taught?”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Finder” (p. 67)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

People , Knowledge

“The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 18 “On the Ice” (p. 252)

Feeling

“He had almost yielded, but not quite. He had not consented. It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 7

Soul , Evil

“Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book Lavinia

Source: Lavinia (2008), p. 184

Life , Women , Men , Truth

“And the rest, all the rest. All the days and lights and winds and years that would have been, and that would not be, that should be and were not, because he was dead. Shot dead on the road, in the wind, at twenty-one. His mountains unclimbed, never to be climbed.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Eye of the Heron

Source: The Eye of the Heron (1978), Chapter 10 (p. 151)

Mountain , Light , Dead

“Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol twisted aside, and the lie come to be.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, City of Illusions (1967), Chapter 2

Lie

“They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Field of Vision” p. 243 (originally published in Galaxy, October 1973)
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

Life , Death , God , World

“Manipulated, one manipulates others.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Other Wind (2001), Chapter 2 “Palaces” (p. 92)

“There’s no way to use power for good.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Finder” (p. 42)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

Way

“The first lesson on Roke, and the last is, Do what is needful! And no more.”
“The lessons in between, then, must consist in learning what is needful.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“They do.”
Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 9, "Orm Embar" (Ged and Arren)

Learning

“There is nothing important except people. A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Lathe of Heaven

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 5 (Haber)

People , Personality

“Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, Tehanu (1990), Chapter 6, "Worsening"

Despair

“I know what they think they seek. But I know it to be a lie. Listen to me, Arren. You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…. That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the light of sunrise and sunset, to buy safety for yourself—safety forever? That is what they seek to do on Wathort and Lorbanery and elsewhere. That is the message that those who know how to hear have heard: By denying life you may deny death and live forever!—And this message I do not hear, Arren, for I will not hear it. I will not take the counsel of despair.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Life , Death , Lie , Thinking

“There’s people all over these parts, and maybe beyond, who think, as you said, that nobody can be wise alone. So these people try to hold to each other.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Finder” (p. 43)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

People , Thinking , Parting

“The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Other Wind (2001), Chapter 4 “Dolphin” (p. 231)

Lovers

“But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility. Who am I—though I have the power to do it—to punish and reward, playing with men’s destinies?”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 4, "Magelight" (Ged)

Men , World , Intelligence , Nature

“She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 6 (p. 183)

Time

“We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God’s truth, the universe at once began to exist.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

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

God , Truth , Lie , Universe

“She knew it, but she did not want to know it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“Dragonfly” (p. 233)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

“As a fiction writer, I don't speak message. I speak story. Sure, my story means something, but if you want to know what it means, you have to ask the question in terms appropriate to storytelling. Terms such as message are appropriate to expository writing, didactic writing, and sermons—different languages from fiction.
The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.”

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

School , Question