American author (1929- )
Once you have learned to do your dreaming wide awake, to balance your sanity not on the razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
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? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness
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. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Tombs of Atuan
The anthropologist cannot always leave his own shadow out of the picture he draws.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
There are souls ... whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never get weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my career--my agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I could send her an utterly indescribable story, and she'd sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorker--she knew where to take it. She never told me what to write or not write, she never told me, That won't sell, and she never meddled with my prose.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013