URSULA K. LE GUIN QUOTES III

American author (1929- )

Well, we think that time "passes," flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed


Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Telling

Tags: belief


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

Tags: suffering


One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

Tags: truth


True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero -- really look -- and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

"Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction", 1976

Tags: mythology


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

Tags: love


The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

Tags: civilization


What is more arrogant than honesty?

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

Tags: honesty


I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Other Wind


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

Tags: desire


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


To hear, one must be silent.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

A Wizard of Earthsea

Tags: silence


Dreams take short cuts.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven

Tags: dreams


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

Tags: machines


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


The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Farthest Shore


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


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

Tags: power


All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Planet of Exile