Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

But he had not brought anything. His hands were empty, as they had always been.

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.

The Veksi are an angry species. Their social life consists largely of arguments, recriminations, quarrels, fights, outbursts of fury, fits of the sulks, brawls, feuds, and impulsive acts of vengeance.

"You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Fortelling?"
"No..."
"To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question."

He detested them for forcing helplessness upon him.

"In Enlad," said Arren after a while, "we have a story about the boy whose schoolmaster
was a stone:'
"Aye?... What did he learn?"
"Not to ask questions.

I don’t know. Do men kill men, except in madness? Does any beast kill its own kind? Only the insects. These yumens kill us as lightly as we kill snakes. The one who taught me said that they kill one another, in quarrels, and also in groups, like ants fighting. I haven’t seen that. But I know they don’t spare one who asks life. They will strike a bowed neck, I have seen it! There is a wish to kill in them, and therefore I saw fit to put them to death.

On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place.

“Why are you always so full of answers?”
“Because life’s so full of questions.”

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

Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number - Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysis, every now and then.

The heavy work requiring muscle and the skilled work with crops and sheep was done by Ged, Shandy, and Tenar, while the two old men who had been there all their lives, his father's men took him about and told him how they managed it all, and truly believed they were managing it all, and shared their believe with him.

My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn’t be given, wouldn’t be taken, but chose my man and my fate.

You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.