1,226 Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Freedom is never very safe.

A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.

Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive

Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.

Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.

The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

If women had power what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.