Quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.

You always have to defend the imagination against idiots.

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.

Independence was as far as his mind could reach. Yet I think his mind groped further, towards what he could not see, the body's obscure, inalterable dream of mutuality.

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.

I never knew anybody, anywhere I have been, who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth, from orbit.

Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.

Ignorant power is a bane!

The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.

There's no way to use power for good.

I fear liars, and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country well. Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts long enough.

The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.

In this he saw that Ogion had been right: the shadow could not draw on his power, so long as he was turned against it.

If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ...But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.

All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.

Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.