Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes - Page 5

You have nothing. You posses nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

I only ask your help, for which I have nothing to give in return."

"Nothing? You call your theory nothing"

"Weigh it in the balance with the freedom of one single human spirit," he said, turning to her, "and which will weigh heavier? Can you tell? I cannot.

... privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

She could not have been born gray. Her
color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed
nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people's world. She had not been born.

It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Yes, that he will. There's the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.

I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point.

The creative adult is the child who survived after the world tried killing them, making them grown up. The creative adult is the child who survived the blandness of schooling, the unhelpful words of bad teachers, and the nay-saying ways of the world. The creative adult is in essence simply that, a child.

If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.

The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

If women had power what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?

The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.

If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?...I mean, men give her [a queen] power. They let her use their power. But it isn't hers, is it? It isn't because she's a woman that she's powerful, but despite it.

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?

While we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

There's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly.

Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along.

We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.