1,226 Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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.

Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever.

The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

They let us be, here, in the cage of our ignorance.

Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd.