What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Ursula K. Le GuinWhat is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
Ursula K. Le GuinSafety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this: Every group we belong to - by gender, sex, race, religion, age - is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.
Ursula K. Le GuinGreat artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.
Ursula K. Le GuinOh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.
Ursula K. Le GuinThere's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.
Ursula K. Le GuinTo learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
Ursula K. Le GuinWhen I'm writing I don't dream much; it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing.
Ursula K. Le GuinA 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.
Ursula K. Le GuinThose who dislike fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled by science. They don't like either hobbits, or quasars; they don't feel at home with them; they don't want complexities, remoteness. If there is any such connection, I'll bet that it is basically an aesthetic one
Ursula K. Le GuinArt, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.
Ursula K. Le GuinI believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.
Ursula K. Le GuinAs 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 GuinA writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
Ursula K. Le GuinThe explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.
Ursula K. Le GuinThe 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 GuinThe thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
Ursula K. Le GuinI 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 GuinEven in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.
Ursula K. Le GuinWhen the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
Ursula K. Le GuinA profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
Ursula K. Le GuinLegends 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 GuinSuccess 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 GuinI never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
Ursula K. Le GuinWe are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
Ursula K. Le GuinIn that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.
Ursula K. Le GuinTo me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.
Ursula K. Le GuinI have become very critical of the whole book award system and could preach on that subject for quite a while, but I do know what an award can mean to a writer early in her career. It can give an essential validation.
Ursula K. Le GuinHate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
Ursula K. Le GuinNothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.
Ursula K. Le GuinArtists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.
Ursula K. Le GuinWho knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.
Ursula K. Le GuinWhat is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one musn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...Insofar as I love life, I love [my country], but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin