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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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, "Dancing at the Edge of the World", 1989)

"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", 1989)

"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)