URSULA K. LE GUIN QUOTES III

American author (1929- )

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

The Left Hand of Darkness


One must work with time and not against it.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

Tags: time


Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Telling

Tags: belief


Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Lavinia

Tags: desire


Dreams take short cuts.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven

Tags: dreams


Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

City of Illusions

Tags: space travel


Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness


What is more arrogant than honesty?

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

Tags: honesty


No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

Tags: suffering


To hear, one must be silent.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

A Wizard of Earthsea

Tags: silence


A person who believes ... that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven


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

The Other Wind

Tags: love


The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Farthest Shore


The thing to remember, however exotic or futuristic or alien the mirror seems, is that you are in fact looking at your world and yourself. Serious science fiction is just as much about the real world and human beings as realistic novels are. (Sometimes more so, I think when faced with yet another dreary story about a dysfunctional upper middle class East Coast urban family.) After all, the imagination can only take apart reality and recombine it. We aren't God, our word isn't the world. But our minds can learn a lot about the world by playing with it, and the imagination finds an infinite playing field in fiction.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, Electric Lit, August 7, 2014


One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

Tags: truth


A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven

Tags: machines


I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Other Wind


Those who build walls are their own prisoners.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed


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.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven

Tags: power


All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Planet of Exile