Ursula K. Le Guin

“I write with all my heart”

“...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I...”

“I’ve read all my life, and I read everything. I’ve been so influenced by so much that as soon as I mention one name I think, “Oh, but I cant’s say that without saying that.” I think there ar...”

“In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.”

“I went to the springs while the sun was still up, and sitting on a rocky outcrop above the cave mouth I watched the light grow reddish across the misty pools, and listened to the troubled vo...”

“I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied.... None of this is spare time. I can't...”

“Well, see, I was thinking, let's say you throw a rock at something. At a tree. You throw it, and it goes through the air and hits the tree. Right? But it can't. Because—can I have the slate?...”

“You don't understand what time is,' he said. 'You say the past is gone. the future is not real, there is no change, no hope. You think Anarres is a future that cannot be reached, as your pas...”

“Time says “Let there be” every moment and instantly there is space and the radiance of each bright galaxy. And eyes beholding radiance. And the gnats’ flickering dance. And the seas’ expanse...”

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

“Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.”

“To light a candle is to cast a shadow...”

“But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.”

“What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn from our birthday to last day - from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, an...”

“Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom...and that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, when they need it, and that's always...”

“What is sacredness? What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful. So the Telling tries to find the truth in events or the pain, or the beauty? No need to try to find it,...”

“If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying st...”

“They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned.”

“Scientific thought is fed by the capacity to 'see' things differently than they have previously been seen.”

“Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes....”