Ursula K. LeGuin Quotes

The artist is merely the one who goes on learning after he grows up. It he is a good learner, he will finally learn the hardest thing: how to see his own world, how to speak in his own words.

The way of art, after all, is neither to cut adrift from the emotions, the senses, the body, etc., and sail off into the void of pure meaning, nor to blind the mind's eye and wallow in irrational, amoral meaninglessness - but to keep open the tenuous, difficult, essential connections between the two extremes. To connect. To connect idea with value, sensation with intuition, cortex with cerebellum.

Theft is an integral part of a healthy literature.

things change:
authors and wizards are not
always to be trusted:
nobody can explain a dragon

Children known perfectly well that unicorns aren't real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

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

Ethics flourishes in the timeless soil of Fantasy, where ideologies wither on the vine.

I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

Standing upright and having two hands doesn't make us human. Standing up and having ideas and ideals does! And holding fast to those ideals. Together. We can't live alone. Or we die alone - like animals.

Most men and women have both men and women inside them, lots of them, and are capable of being much more than they're told they're capable of being.

His ambition, his wish to do good, his wish to control, that's not male, that's just human.

Hate eats the hater.

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.

Those who refuse to listen to dragons are probably doomed to spend their lives acting out the nightmares of politicians. We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.

We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

Four hours' sleep a night plus the invention of algebra might well change a man.

What God was, in fact, was a doctor, a famous surgeon: don't ask questions, I don't answer them, pay your fees, I'll save you if I care to be if I don't it's your own fault.

Most dreams are forgotten, try as one will to remember. Yet later music strikes the note, and the harmonic rings along the mandolin strings of the mind, and we find tears in our eyes.

One's mind is never simply one's own, even at birth and even less so as one lives, learns, loses, etc.

I always grow poetic when I am lying to myself.