Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?

A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.

It appears that we've given up on the long-range view. That we've decided not to think about consequences — about cause and effect. Maybe that's why I feel that I live in exile. I used to live in a country that had a future.

“She obeys me, but only because she wants to.”
“It’s the only justification for obedience,” Ged observed.

Men who fight wars in Winter don’t live till Spring.

She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.

To find a new world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.

The most winning characteristic of the rather harsh Cetian temperament was curiosity, inopportune, and inexhaustible curiosity; Cetians died eagerly, curious as to what came next.

So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it.
We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom...

A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.

We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. 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.

“Long ago we parted,” said the slight, still man of the Fiia. “Longer ago we were one. What we are not, they are. What we are, they are not. Think of the sunlight and the grass and the trees that bear fruit, Semley; think that not all roads that lead down lead up as well.”

Many feminists have been grieved or aggrieved by The Left Hand of Darkness because the androgynes in it are called ‘he’ throughout. In the third person singular, the English generic pronoun is the same as the masculine pronoun. A fact worth reflecting upon. And it’s a trap, with no way out, because the exclusion of the feminine (she) and the neuter (it) from the generic/masculine (he) makes the use of either of them more specific, more unjust, as it were, than the use of ‘he.’ And I find made-up pronouns, ‘te’ and ‘heshe’ and so on, dreary and annoying.

It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.