Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

“To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.”

“Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.”

“There's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly.”

“As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage.”

“I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don’t have to learn.”Vokep shook his head grimly. “It’s the kids,” he said. “Having babies. Makes ’em propertarians. They won’t let go.” He ...”

“COME HOME, TENAR! COME HOME!”In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white...”

“It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.”

“Oh, Hank," Susan whispered, "their wings are furry.""Oh, James," Harriet whispered, "their hands are kind.”

“An Odonian’s goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.”

“Not even need and love can defeat fate...”

“The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future - indeed Schrödinger most famous thought experiment goes to show that the...”

“There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as t...”

“Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name’s the motherof the ten thousand things.”

“A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government in earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.”

“I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in ...”

“Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.”

“It's a queer business, making oneself blind.”

“«I am tired,» he said. «I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire will power, the accumulated strength of my entire existe...”

“With eye and hand and breath and will.”

“If nobody teaches us the words, the thoughts, we stay ignorant. If nobody shows a little child, two, three years old, how to look for the way, the signs of the path, the landmarks, then it gets los...”