Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

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

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

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

"We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains."

"There are no right answers to wrong questions."

"Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not."

"I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived."

"As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope."

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep."

"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."

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

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

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

"The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words."

"My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it."

"If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic."

"In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void."

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

"To oppose something is to maintain it."

"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."

"It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music."

"I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever."

"The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself."

"I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant."

"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."

"The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so."

"I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth."

"If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that."

"If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern."

"Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby."