110+ Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes On Writing, Imaginative And Insightful

Ursula K. Le Guin was an American writer of speculative fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. She wrote many books, including the Earthsea series and the Left Hand of Darkness. Le Guin was a major influence on the development of science fiction and fantasy, and she won multiple awards for her work, including the Hugo and Nebula awards. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin on writing, love, imaginative.

Top 10 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

1. The creative adult is the child who has survived.
2. People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
3. The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
4. I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
5. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.
6. 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.
7. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
8. Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
9. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words.
10. When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor.

Ursula K. Le Guin Short Quotes

• The light is the left hand of darkness.
• We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
• To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.
• Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
• The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
• It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
• Paradise is for those who make paradise.
• When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
• But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
• Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings

Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes About Writing

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing. — Ursula K. Le Guin

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. — Ursula K. Le Guin

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper. — Ursula K. Le Guin

There are dance artists, painting artists and writing artists. Authors are writing artists. You can practice art in whatever medium you choose, and words are mine. — Ursula K. Le Guin

If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes About Love

A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? — Ursula K. Le Guin

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? — Ursula K. Le Guin

What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Love is the true condition of human life. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Not even need and love can defeat fate. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes About Imaginative

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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 . — Ursula K. Le Guin

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention. — Ursula K. Le Guin

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope. — Ursula K. Le Guin

He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny. — Ursula K. Le Guin

There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes About World

The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow. — Ursula K. Le Guin

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We read books to find out who we are. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making. — Ursula K. Le Guin

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes About Imagination

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Truth is a matter of the imagination. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes About Questions

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself. — Ursula K. Le Guin

There are no right answers to wrong questions. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you? — Ursula K. Le Guin

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book. — Ursula K. Le Guin

After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes About Care

I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it... By using words well they strengthen their souls. — Ursula K. Le Guin

All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin Famous Quotes And Sayings

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, 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. Very often in our art, the art of words. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women. — Ursula K. Le Guin

She obeys me, but only because she wants to. It's the only justification for obedience, Ged observed. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky. — Ursula K. Le Guin

And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Besides, when you say you're a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it's kind of irresistible. — Ursula K. Le Guin

There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life--evolution--the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy--existence itself--is essentially change. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling? — Ursula K. Le Guin

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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 — Ursula K. Le Guin

Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live. — Ursula K. Le Guin

All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark. — Ursula K. Le Guin

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss. — Ursula K. Le Guin

What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. — Ursula K. Le Guin

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being. — Ursula K. Le Guin

You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. — Ursula K. Le Guin

One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith. — Ursula K. Le Guin

As a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing,but does only and wholly what he must do. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however - that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc — Ursula K. Le Guin

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place. — Ursula K. Le Guin

And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Alone, no one wins freedom. — Ursula K. Le Guin

But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power...It must follow knowledge, and serve need. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To oppose something is to maintain it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

True understanding is the spur of genius — Ursula K. Le Guin

Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment. — Ursula K. Le Guin

If your voice is heard by more people because you've earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation. — Ursula K. Le Guin

If civilization has an opposite, it is war. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To light a candle is to cast a shadow. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. "If it is not, what is?" He could not endure those remembered words. — Ursula K. Le Guin

In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. — Ursula K. Le Guin

This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. — Ursula K. Le Guin

In innocence there is no strength against evil, said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. But there is strength in it for good. — Ursula K. Le Guin

In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Life Lessons by Ursula K. Le Guin

1. Ursula K. Le Guin teaches us to be fearless in our exploration of new ideas and to challenge conventions that limit our potential.
2. She encourages us to be open to different perspectives and to embrace the beauty of diversity.
3. Through her work, she shows us the importance of using our imaginations to create a better world.