Language Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

I've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“A writer's moral duty is to use language thoughtfully and well.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“a book is a box of words until you open it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it... By using words well they…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“ 'Banished men should never speak their native tongue; it comes bitter from their mouth. And this language suits a traitor better,…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse;…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Does it ever occur to such reviewers that the meaning of the story might lie in the language itself, in the movement…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Then suddenly he was aware of a man clothed in white who watched him through the falling water of the fountain. As…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Whatever language we speak, before we begin a sentence we have an almost infinite choice of words to use. A, The, They,…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Heaven and earth begin in the unnamed: name’s the mother of the ten thousand things.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin