American author (1929- )
Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
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The Dispossessed
Where there's property, there's theft.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit's strength lies in holding fast to the truth.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"The Eye of the Heron"
Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, Salon, November 17, 2014
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Wind's Twelve Quarters
The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading", Harper's Magazine, February 2008
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
We sleep researchers like cats, you know; they sleep a lot!
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
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
Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
It always seemed to me they're sort of alike ... magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tales from Earthsea
A man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Young he was not, so that one had to call him old, but the word did not suit him.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
Once you have learned to do your dreaming wide awake, to balance your sanity not on the razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven