Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

I was afraid I'd fail. So I didn't work.'

I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a sel...

I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination. I

I think one cannot be left alive among so many deaths without feeling unendurable shame.

I think most old people know that, and many of us try to keep our thinking on the positive side as a matter of self-preservation, as well as dignity, the wish not to end with a prolonged whimper.

I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, man...

I never knew a person who reacted so wholly and rapidly to a changed situation as Estraven. I was recovering, and willing to go; he was out of thangen; the instant that was all clear, he was off. He w...

I learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence. By

I hold it self-evident that so long as we live in a man’s world, as we still do, women have a right to create enclaves of learning or work where, instead of obeying or imitating what men do and want,...

I felt the pressure of people all around me, all the time. People around me, people with me, people pressing on me, pressing me to be one of them, one of the people.

I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I...

I don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn’t a matter of faith, but of evidence.

I didn't know you well at all. Only, when you spoke, I seemed to see clear into you, into the center.

I did not live my life as history is written.

I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls.

I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied.... None of this is spare time. I can't spare it....

I bid your voice be dumb until the day you find a word worth speaking.

I asked if these two psychopaths could not be cured. Cured? Goss said. Would you cure a singer of his voice?

I am yours by parentage and custom and by duty undertaken towards you. I am your wizard. But it is time you recalled that, tough I am a servant, I am not your servant.

How would it ever occur to a sane man that he could fly?