American author (1929- )
The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tales from Earthsea
The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
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
To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Guardian, December 17, 2005
Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
City of Illusions
When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. or wonder who, after all, you are.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.
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
Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
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
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
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
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
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