Ursula K. Le Guin
380 quotes
Biography
"It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope."
"The creative adult is the child who has survived."
"People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within."
"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."
"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."
"To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness."
"Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it."
"It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul."
"Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books."
"Truth is a matter of the imagination."
"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul."
"Belief is the wound that knowledge heals."
"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."
"To light a candle is to cast a shadow..."
"Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place."
"But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge."
"To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road."
"I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination."
"A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere."
"She'll die.' 'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive."
"What good is power when you're too wise to use it?"
"To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune."
"Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?"
"I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now."
"There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus."