Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

“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.”

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”

“Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.”

“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.”

“What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”

“When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.”

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

“A man wants his virility regarded. A woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation.”

“A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.”

“Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.”

“I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.”

“If civilization has an opposite, it is war.”

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”

“No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.”

“The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.”

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

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

“To oppose something is to maintain it.”

“Truth is a matter of the imagination.”

“When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.”

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”

“We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”