Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

His authority was in fact immense but he never stood on it. He sat down on it, comfortably, and invited you to sit down with him.

This was the way he had to go, he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.

We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.

The literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives.

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.

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.

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

Would you walk away from Omelas?

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

What good is power when you're too wise to use it?

He could not se a possible, general good above Selver's imperative need. You can't save a people by selling your friend.

Let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.

Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive

It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.

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.

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.

It is not easy for a person to grow up. The process takes a long time. Many years, maybe many lifetimes.

The mountains have always been here, and in them, the bears.

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

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

Change is the only thing that is unchangeable.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

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.

Gender is not something we are born with, and not something we have, but something we do.

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

First sentences are doors to worlds.

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

Reality is not what it seems, nor is it otherwise.

Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it.

To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.

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

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

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