May Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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

One man may as easily destroy, as govern: be King or Anti-King.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write.…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures,…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

What good is music? None ... and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading,…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time. As all the stars may be reflected…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Do remember, though, that unless you're a playwright, the result [dialogue] isn't what you want; it's only an element of what you…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do.We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal.…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

The backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no…

— Ursula K. Le Guin