Ursula K Le Guin Quotes
To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
Each thing, each being, is unique. All shine with their own light.
In innocence, there is no bravery.
The creative adult is the child who has survived.
Love does not just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
There is no reason to accept the boundaries others have placed on us.
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgment, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.
Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all maps change. There are new mountains.
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.
There are no right answers to wrong questions.
To refuse death is to refuse life.
The human mind is capable of miracles, the thing is to perform the miracles that lie within our capabilities.
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
The creative adult is the child who has survived.
If you see a whole thing – it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
Eternal is a meaningless word. Time is a river with many currents. You may have come to a calm stretch of the river a thousand years long. Or you may have confronted a series of rapids, rapids full of rocks and whirlpools, for a few years or decades or centuries. By your clock, you may have taken a brief ride, a brief fraction of eternity.
The law is not just a word for what pleases the powerful while oppressing the powerless.
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
True journey is return.
To oppose something is to maintain it.
The story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter.
The future always exists first in imagination, then in will, then in reality.
The power of the storyteller is vast—intense and subtle, and perilous.
It is so much easier to blame others than to understand them.
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
That’s one of the things men are good at. No matter how much they mess up, they’re sure God meant for them to run the world.
It is hard to remember that you are free to believe and disbelieve what you please.
The trouble isn’t that we have too little of the power of language to serve our needs. It is that we misuse the power we have.
Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free.
Light is the left hand of darkness…how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one.
There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate, it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
There is a road in the hearts of all of us, hidden and seldom traveled, which leads to an unknown, secret place.
We are all moulded and remoulded by those who have loved us and, though the love may pass, we are nevertheless their work for good or ill.
Fear, like pain, presaged harm.
In a world of locked rooms, the man with the key is king. And honey, you should see me in a crown.
It puckers and it burns.
If power was made from wisdom and justice, who among us wouldn’t bow to obeyed by it?
Resistance is futile.?
Shadow owes its birth to light.
Pain is the price we pay for love, you know. The more we love, the more we can feel pain. Inverse is true too. The more we feel pain, the less we can love.
A wizard cannot do everything; a fact most magicians are reticent to admit, let alone discuss with prospective clients. Still, the fact remains that there are certain objects, and people, that are, for one reason or another, completely immune to any direct magical spell.
The creative adult is the child who has survived.