1,226 Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we have is here, now.

If the yumens are men they are men unfit or untaught to dream and to act as men. Therefore they go about in torment killing and destroying, driven by the gods within, whom they will not set free but try to uproot and deny. If they are men they are evil men, having denied their own gods, afraid to see their own faces in the dark.

Time says “Let there be”every moment and instantlythere is space and the radianceof each bright galaxy.And eyes beholding radiance.And the gnats’ flickering dance.And the seas’ expanse.And death, and chance.

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.

But what when there [is] not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and it’s tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.

There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

Hideo," said my mother, in the terrifying way women have of passing without interval from one subject to another because they have them all present in their mind at once, "you haven't found any kind of relationship?

Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.