Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

About Ursula K. Le Guin:

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin is an American author of novels, children's books, and short stories, mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She has also written poetry and essays. First published in the 1960s, her work has often depicted futuristic or imaginary alternative worlds in politics, natural environment, gender, religion, sexuality and ethnography.
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Truth be told, there wasn't a single one of them who didn't deserve a lightning bolt from the Almighty. Everything else was straight mercy.

Ursula K. Le Guin

To light a candle is to cast a shadow...

Ursula K. Le Guin

As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is...

Ursula K. Le Guin

War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness ...

Ursula K. Le Guin

Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for li...

Ursula K. Le Guin

For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.

Ursula K. Le Guin

But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Ursula K. Le Guin

On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, n...

Ursula K. Le Guin

The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or ...

Ursula K. Le Guin

War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness ...

Ursula K. Le Guin

But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.

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

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...

Ursula K. Le Guin

Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Ursula K. Le Guin

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.

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

We 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 Guin

There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Author Bio

  • NameUrsula K. Le Guin
  • DescriptionAmerican writer known best for speculative fiction
  • AliasesUrsula Kroeber
  • BornOctober 21, 1929
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Screenwriter; Translator; Novelist; Poet
  • WorksEarthsea Series; Hainish Cycle
  • AwardsMargaret Edwards Award; Nebula Award; Prometheus Award - Hall Of Fame