Ursula K. LeGuin

“Sure, it's simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.”

“To oppose something is to maintain it.”

“You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.”

“Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.”

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

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

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

“A person who believes ... that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.”

“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.”

“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.”