Quote

I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ursula K. Le Guin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1929
Born: October 21
Died: 2018
Died: January 22
Author
Feminist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Berkeley
California
Ursula Kroeber
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Found
Looks
Never
Time
Details
Think
Anybody
Thinking
Leave
Life
Knew
Simple

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Image
And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Hope is a slow business.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. If it is not, what is? He could not endure those remembered words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
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
Image
Even a poet cannot get everything right.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
One man may as easily destroy, as govern: be King or Anti-King.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
We read books to find out who we are.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
Ursula K. Le Guin