1,226 Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Men who fight wars in winter don’t live till spring.

We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn’t work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds.

We weren’t cruel, we were ignorant, foolish. Children are ignorant and foolish. But they learn. If they are given a chance to learn.

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance.

Endurance may outlast hope.

I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn’t it what all the great wars and battles are fought for – so that at day’s end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?

The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved; the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.

Lord Berosty rem ir Ipe came to Thangering Fastness and offered forty beryls and half the year’s yield from his orchards as the price of a Foretelling, and the price was acceptable. He set his question to the Weaver Odren, and the question was, On what day shall I die?