I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
URSULA K. LE GUINResistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art – the art of words.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
There are no right answers to wrong questions.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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 -
What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
URSULA K. LE GUIN







