American author (1929- )
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coin itself.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Wave in the Mind: Talks & Essays on the Writer, the Reader, & the Imagination
Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
While we read a novel, we are insane--bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin--the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
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
The Lathe of Heaven
O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
foreward, Tales from Earthsea
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. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence. He did not see the connections, which is said to be the hallmark of intellect. He felt connections--like a plumber.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A Wizard of Earthsea
Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Tombs of Atuan
Greed puts out the sun.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Other Wind
One swallow does not make a summer.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tehanu