The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
URSULA K. LE GUINBut where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
-
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Every group we belong to – by gender, sex, race, religion, age – is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died.
URSULA K. LE GUIN