American author (1929- )
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"
Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Telling
Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
Dreams take short cuts.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Lavinia
Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
City of Illusions
What is more arrogant than honesty?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
To hear, one must be silent.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A Wizard of Earthsea
A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
A person who believes ... that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Other Wind
The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
The thing to remember, however exotic or futuristic or alien the mirror seems, is that you are in fact looking at your world and yourself. Serious science fiction is just as much about the real world and human beings as realistic novels are. (Sometimes more so, I think when faced with yet another dreary story about a dysfunctional upper middle class East Coast urban family.) After all, the imagination can only take apart reality and recombine it. We aren't God, our word isn't the world. But our minds can learn a lot about the world by playing with it, and the imagination finds an infinite playing field in fiction.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, Electric Lit, August 7, 2014
I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Other Wind
Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Planet of Exile