Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

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

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work - not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.

I write with all my heart

Sure, it's simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.

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

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

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

And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life

Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.

A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place.

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

Truth is a matter of the imagination.

A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.

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

I don’t know which I should fear more . . . death or life. I wish I could be done with fear.

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.