Quote

Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?

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
Make
Fierce
Gods
Hearts
Fire
Desire
Heart

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Image
It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it's an easy name to call another man.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
A man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons there was one of them just now that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Even a poet cannot get everything right.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power...It must follow knowledge, and serve need.
Ursula K. Le Guin