Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes page 3

“What was the good working for freedom all your life and ending up without any freedom at all?”

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

“No doors were locked, few shut. There were no disguises and no advertisements. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to the hand.”

“The Day Before the Revolution” p. 272 (originally published in Galaxy, August 1974)
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

“He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 4 (p. 99)

“He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it?
Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecroppers’s wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 5 (pp. 130-131)

“Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.”

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

“There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, City of Illusions (1967), Chapter 9

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, it turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have been forced to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 11 (Orr)

“He resolved not to speak again until he had controlled his temper.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 9 (p. 300) — from the protagonist’s major speech.

“All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that’s the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it’s life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?”

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

“She too had lost her luck, and known death, and gone on.”

Source: Earthsea Books, The Other Wind (2001), Chapter 1 “Mending the Green Pitcher” (pp. 47-48)

“There’s a point, around age twenty,” Bedap said, “when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”

Source: The Eye of the Heron (1978), Chapter 11 (p. 167)

“Mede spoke with amused tolerance, as physicists generally speak of biologists.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Dispossessed (1974), Chapter 8 (p. 249)

“There was a pretty prince of Troy named Paris. He and a Greek queen ran off together. Her husband called the other kings of Greece together, and they went to Troy, a great army in a thousand beaked ships, to get the woman back. Helen was her name."
"What did they want her back for?"
"Her husband's honor demanded it."
"I should think his honor demanded that he divorce her and find himself a decent wife.”

“The Masters” p. 46 (originally published in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, February 1963)
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

Ursula K. Le Guin book Lavinia

"Lavinia, these people were Greeks."
(The spirit of Virgil explains the Trojan war to Lavinia.) p. 44
Lavinia (2008)

““What harm have the trees done them?” he said. “Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men.””

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people.”

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 9, "Orm Embar" (Arren)

“But maybe you're just as glad he’s not a shrink, eh? Awful to have your spouse analyzing your unconscious desires across the dinner table, eh?”

The Operating Instructions in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004)

“Armed men don’t sit down and talk.”

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

““Is it different, then, for men and for women?”
“What isn’t, dearie?””

Source: The Eye of the Heron (1978), Chapter 8 (p. 107)

“On Aka, god is a word without referent. No capital letters. No creator, only creation. No eternal father to reward and punish, justify injustice, ordain cruelty, offer salvation. Eternity not an endpoint but a continuity. Primal division of being into material and spiritual only as two-as-one, or one in two aspects. […] The Akan system is a spiritual discipline with spiritual goals, but they're exactly the same goals it seeks for bodily and ethical well-being. Right action is its own reward. Dharma without karma.”

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

“The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Telling (2000), Ch. 4, §3 (p. 94)

“They had learned how to listen for the sense of the meeting, not the voice of the loudest. They had learned that they must judge each time whether obedience was necessary and right, or misplaced and wrong. They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit’s strength lies in holding fast to the truth.”

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

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

Source: The Eye of the Heron (1978), Chapter 4 (pp. 53-54)

“To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 5 “The Domestication of Hunch” (p. 70)

““But what’s the good of this sort of ‘understanding,’” Dearri said, “if it doesn’t result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn’t it?”
“You ask questions like a true profiteer,” Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction.”

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

“It is light that defeats the dark.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 7 (p. 224)

“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.”

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

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

Orr
The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

““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.””

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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.”

“Easy victories aren’t worth winning.”

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

“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.”

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

“What is more arrogant than honesty?”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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.”

“What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.”

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

“The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.”

“Dragonfly” (p. 236)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.”

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 9 (p. 272)

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”

"American SF and The Other" in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975. Reprinted in The Language of the Night, 1979.

“Go to bed; tired is stupid.”

"A Few Words to a Young Writer" http://www.ursulakleguin.com/WordsYoungWriter.html (2008)