Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

“A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't "get into" me, it is already my deepest self. The p...”

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the ...”

“Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive”

“The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth an light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. Fro...”

“I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.”

“But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord.""It might to keep it open.”

“Odo said it all her life. 'Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice!”

“They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describ...”

“They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand ...”

“They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into thedarkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe...”

“He began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used o...”

“Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward to...”

“I'm afraid of life! There are times I--I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn't all a misunderstanding-- this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain... ...”

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

“The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were pro...”

“Truth is a matter of the imagination.”

“Children know perfectly well that unicorns arent real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.”

“I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains ...”

“Hope is a slighter, tougher thing even than trust, he thought, pacing his room as the soundless, vague lightning flashed overhead. In a good season one trusts life; in a bad season one only hopes, ...”