1,226 Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Violence gains nothing, killing wins nothing—only sometimes nothing is what people want. Death is what they want. And they get it.

After a pause she said, "I see your magic is not good only for large things.""Hospitality," he said, "kindness to a stranger, that's a very large thing.

This concern, feebly called 'love of nature', seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.

Students are intense people, they laugh and cry, they break down and rebuild.

But I can't say that gratitude was my motive for infringing on the Law of Cultural Embargo. I was not paying my debt to him. Such debts remain owing. Estraven and I had simply arrived at the point where we shared whatever we had that was worth sharing.

And everything we do finally serves evil, because that's what we are. Greed and cruelty. I look at the world, at the forests and the mountains here, the sky, and it's all right, as it should be. But we aren't. People aren't. We're wrong. We do wrong. No animal does wrong. How could they? But we can, and we do. And we never stop.

And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet I would remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.

It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.

For the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest.