American author (1929- )
Go to bed; tired is stupid.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A Wizard of Earthsea
When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit's strength lies in holding fast to the truth.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"The Eye of the Heron"
The more defensive a society, the more conformist.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
City of Illusions
The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, Salon, November 17, 2014
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Telling
To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tales from Earthsea
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness