Quotes By Ursula K. Le Guin

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever.

The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

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

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

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'

In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

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

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

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.

The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

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

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

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

To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.

Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.

To oppose something is to maintain it.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.