URSULA K. LE GUIN QUOTES IV

American author (1929- )

Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013

Tags: realism


Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

Tags: revolution


O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

foreward, Tales from Earthsea

Tags: present


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

Tags: dragons


You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

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

Tags: ideas


Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Tombs of Atuan


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

Tags: morality


No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

Tags: patriotism


Nothing succeeds like success.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness


There are very real differences between science fiction and realistic fiction, between horror and fantasy, between romance and mystery. Differences in writing them, in reading them, in criticizing them. Vive les différences! They're what gives each genre its singular flavor and savor, its particular interest for the reader--and the writer.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, Electric Lit, August 7, 2014


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

Tags: silence


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


Go to bed; tired is stupid.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

A Wizard of Earthsea

Tags: sleep


Greed puts out the sun.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Other Wind

Tags: greed


Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

URSULA K. LE GUIN

A Wizard of Earthsea

Tags: power


It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Tehanu


Men are afraid of virgins, but they have a cure for their own fear and the virgin's virginity.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

"The Space Crone", Co-Evolution Quarterly, summer 1976


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


One swallow does not make a summer.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven

Tags: summer