Quotes from 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

Do you know how to read?" "No. It is one of the black arts." He nodded. "But a useful one," he said.

It was men's ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.

There are dance artists, painting artists and writing artists. Authors are writing artists. You can practice art in whatever medium you choose, and words are mine.

Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

Love doesn't sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new.

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

The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.

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.

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

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.

If you see a whole thing — it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.

Nobody who says, 'I told you so' has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.

Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

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

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

The king was pregnant.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

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.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. 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.