URSULA K. LE GUIN QUOTES VI

American author (1929- )


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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.

URSULA K. LE GUIN
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Tehanu


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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

Tags: pain


Nothing succeeds like success.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness


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

Tags: poetry


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

Tags: fantasy


Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

Tags: fear


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


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


Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

Tags: physics


Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

Tags: revolution


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

Tags: power


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


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


I'm not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I don't really think there is one answer, so I never went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful. I like trying on ideas and ways of life and religious approaches. I'm just not a good candidate for conversion.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013

Tags: religion


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"

Tags: violence


Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Telling

Tags: civilization


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

Tags: sleep


Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

Tags: suffering


The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven


A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Word for World is Forest

Tags: realism