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Ursula K. Le Guin: 584 quotes22 likes

“I haven't any strength, I haven't any character, I'm a born tool. I haven't any destiny. All I have is dreams. And now other people run them.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Lathe of Heaven

Orr
The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

“Well,” he said. “Strange roads have strange guides. Let’s go on.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 6, "Lorbanery" (Ged)

““But now you've come too far, and I warn you, woman! I will not have you set foot on this domain. And if you cross my will or dare so much as speak to me again, I will have you driven from Re Albi, and off the Overfell, with the dogs at your heels. Have you understood me?”
“No,” Tenar said, “I have never understood men like you.””

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, Tehanu (1990), Chapter 9, "Finding Words"

“Before the gods and after, always, are the streams. Caves, stones, hills. Trees. The earth. The darkness of the earth.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“Dragonfly” (p. 227)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

“It is not human to be without shame and without desire.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 13 “Down on the Farm” (p. 177)

“It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 8 (p. 256)

“There’s nothing to fear, Lebannen,” he said gently, mockingly. “They were only the dead.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 11, "Selidor"

“Many feminists have been grieved or aggrieved by The Left Hand of Darkness because the androgynes in it are called ‘he’ throughout. In the third person singular, the English generic pronoun is the same as the masculine pronoun. A fact worth reflecting upon. And it’s a trap, with no way out, because the exclusion of the feminine (she) and the neuter (it) from the generic/masculine (he) makes the use of either of them more specific, more unjust, as it were, than the use of ‘he.’ And I find made-up pronouns, ‘te’ and ‘heshe’ and so on, dreary and annoying.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Introduction to the story “Winter‘s King” p. 85
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

“Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 2 (Ogion)

“To be whole is to be part;
true voyage is return.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 3 (p. 84)

“He always asked, why thus? why this way, not another way? I answered: Because in what we do daily and in the way we do it, we enact the gods. He said: Then the gods are only what we do. I said: In what we do rightly, the gods are.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book Four Ways to Forgiveness

"A Man of the People", p. 106
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)

“The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Finder” (p. 80)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

“Easy victories aren’t worth winning.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Eye of the Heron

Source: The Eye of the Heron (1978), Chapter 4 (p. 54)

“She had come to Aka to learn how to sing this world's tune, to dance its dance; and at last, she thought, away from the city's endless noise, she was beginning to hear the music and to learn how to move to it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Telling (2000), Ch. 4, §3 (p. 91)

“Obsessed with tricking the girl, he had fallen into the trap he laid for her. Bitterly he recognised that he was always believing his own lies, caught in nets he had elaborately woven.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“Dragonfly” (p. 211)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

“What is more arrogant than honesty?”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 15 “To the Ice” (p. 213)

“There is not much good spending twelve hours a day in a black hole in the ground all your life long if there’s nothing there, no secret, no treasure, nothing hidden.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Stars Below” p. 212 (originally published in Orbit 14, edited by Damon Knight)
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

“Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind, it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 9 (p. 278)

“I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book Lavinia

(Virgil, to Lavinia) p. 45
Lavinia (2008)

“Where my guides lead me in kindness
I follow, follow lightly,
and there are no footprints
in the dust behind us.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Telling (2000), Ch. 3, §2 (p. 72)