Quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin

If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even.

Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.

Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.

To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.

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

We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.

Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.

When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

What is life without incompatible realities?

They can send death at once, but life is slower.

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

I've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.

There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!

Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.

The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.

You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.