1,226 Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

An Odonian’s goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.

All her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars.

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?

While we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers.

The king was pregnant.

...I, like Borges, think of heaven as something very like a library

The child stared at her or at nothing, trying to breathe, and trying again to breathe, and trying again to breathe.

It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.

If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life.