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Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

Best Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin (Top 10)

  1. Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
  2. People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
  3. A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
  4. The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
  5. You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
  6. My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
  7. Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.
  8. 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.
  9. Change is freedom, change is life. It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed. There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.
  10. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

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