Verified Quotes
Every quote on this page is verified against the named source work.
Ursula K. Le Guin, American writer who used thought experiments as moral instruments, insisting that any human power can be, gets quoted everywhere and sourced almost nowhere. The 14 quotes below are different: each one is checked word for word against the cited work, starting with A Wizard of Earthsea, not copied from aggregator sites that pass misattributions along. The source is named under every line, so you can trace each quote back to the page it came from.
Read Ursula K. Le Guin's full profile and how they reason →3 verified quotes
On staying present in a long project instead of only chasing the finish line:
It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters, in the end.Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
On making a big decision without knowing how it turns out:
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
Making peace with two opposing parts of yourself you keep trying to separate:
Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
1 verified quote
On choosing creative honesty over a safer commercial path:
We will need writers who can remember freedom, poets, visionaries, realists of a larger reality.Ursula K. Le Guin, 2014 National Book Awards acceptance speech
4 verified quotes
On accepting that any real action has a cost:
To light a candle is to cast a shadow.Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
On thinking through the ripple effects before acting on impulse:
You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
Deciding whether to leave a job you resent but have grown used to:
It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
Finding meaning in a loss by recognizing what it makes possible:
Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
1 verified quote
On trusting your own experience over the official version of things:
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change.Ursula K. Le Guin, A Left-Handed Commencement Address
2 verified quotes
Deciding whether confrontation or silence better serves a cause you believe in:
You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Recognizing a bond forged by shared hardship rather than by choice:
It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers.Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
1 verified quote
Deciding whether to keep following someone else's moral rulebook or build your own:
Everybody has to figure out for themselves what's right and what's wrong, whether they follow one master or many or none.Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
1 verified quote
Deciding whether to finish and share creative work instead of keeping it private:
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, The Wave in the Mind
1 verified quote
On why a long relationship needs remaking, not just history:
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven