Ursula K. Le Guin, American Author Quotes

The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there -- you build yourself. Those are the high ones, the thick ones, the ones with no doors in.

You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.

A person who believes ... That there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.

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. Mary Baker Eddy

I doubt the imagination can be suppressed. If.

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

Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.

A man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.