Top 15 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

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

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

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 treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

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.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

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

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.