American author (1929- )
Morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
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 Left Hand of Darkness
I don't think science fiction is a very good name for it, but it's the name that we've got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I can get prickly and combative is if I'm just called a sci-fi writer. I'm not. I'm a novelist and poet. Don't shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don't fit, because I'm all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Telling
The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Wave in the Mind: Talks & Essays on the Writer, the Reader, & 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
Go to bed; tired is stupid.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A Wizard of Earthsea
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
Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tehanu
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coin itself.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence. He did not see the connections, which is said to be the hallmark of intellect. He felt connections--like a plumber.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
One swallow does not make a summer.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life--evolution--the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy--existence itself--is essentially change.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness