“For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.” — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?' ...'Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“One keeps oneself neat out of mere decency mere sanity, awareness of other people. And finally even that goes, and one dribbles… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The only thing that makes life possible is a permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices...… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says.… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“The Veksi are an angry species. Their social life consists largely of arguments, recriminations, quarrels, fights, outbursts of fury, fits of the… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, in… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“And I did nothing, nothing but try to hide from the horror of dying." He stopped, for saying the truth aloud was… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“...insofar as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives...But close up, a world's all… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from,… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“If you can see a thing whole, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planet,lives...But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks.… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“We came, Takver thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“It exists,” Shevek said, spreading out his hands. “It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ...But also if it were proven that there… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Odo said it all her life. 'Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice!” — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way. It… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“...I wore his blood for clothing, on my legs and thighs and hands: a dry, stiff, brown garment with no warmth in it.” — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Aeneas' mother is a star?" "No; a goddess." I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Meaning - this is perhaps the common note, the bane I am seeking. What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“. . . chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
