Ursula K Le Guin - Collected Quotes

"But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. […] It is dangerous, that power. [...] It must follow knowledge, and serve need." (Ursula K Le Guin, "A Wizard of Earthsea", 1968)

"He thought no more of performing the lesser arts of magic than a bird thinks of flying. Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness." (Ursula K. Le Guin, "A Wizard of Earthsea", 1968)

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep". (Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness", 1969)

"A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear." (Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Lathe of Heaven", 1971)

"Isn’t the measure of complexity the measure of the eternal joy?" (Ursula K Le Guin, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow", 1971)

"When things don't change any longer, that's the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less balance there is - and the more life." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Lathe of Heaven", 1971)

"Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose . . . That selfhood, which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself ?" (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Farthest Shore", 1972)

"What man would not live forever, if he could?" (Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Farthest Shore", 1972)

"It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atomic bomb, and then puts its hands over its eyes and says, 'My God what have I done?'" (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Stalin in the Soul", 1973)

"It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia", 1974)

"Music is a cooperative art, organic by definition, social. It may be the noblest form of social behavior we’re capable of. It’s certainly one of the noblest jobs an individual can undertake. And by its nature, by the nature of any art, it’s a sharing. The artist shares, it’s the essence of his act." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia", 1974)

"Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Dispossessed", 1974)

"Scientific truth will out, you can’t hide the sun under a stone." (Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia", 1974)

"The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia", 1974)

"You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia", 1974)

"The best maze is the mind." (Ursula K Le Guin, "Mazes", 1975)

"All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life - science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness", [introduction] 1976)

"Intellectualism tends to foster negative thinking and may lead to psychosis, and those suffering from it should ideally be treated, as Professor Arca was treated, and released if still competent." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Diary of the Rose", 1976)

"It is amazing how banal most people’s minds are. [...] I used to think how wonderful other people’s minds would be, how wonderful it was going to be to share in all the different worlds, the different colors of their passions and ideas. How naïve I was!" (Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘"The Diary of the Rose", 1976)

"Time is no longer a line along which history, past or future, lies neatly arranged, but a field of great mystery and complexity, in the contemplation of which the mind perceives an immense terror, and an indestructible hope." (Ursula K Le Guin, 1977) 

"It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atomic bomb." (Ursula K Le Guin, "Language of the Night", 1979)

"If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction", 1986)

"Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story." (Ursula K Le Guin, "Dancing at the Edge of the World", 1986)

"A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended." (Ursula K Le Guin, "Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea", 1990)

"My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it." (Ursula . Le Guin, "The Creatures on My Mind", 1990)

"All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. [...] No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot get back to seeing the part as the whole." (Ursula K Le Guin, "A Man of the People", 1995)