Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula Kroeber Le Guinis an American author of novels, children's books, and short stories, mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She has also written poetry and essays. First published in the 1960s, her work has often depicted futuristic or imaginary alternative worlds in politics, the natural environment, gender, religion, sexuality and ethnography...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth21 October 1929
CountryUnited States of America
rooms spirit makers
All makers must leave room for acts of the spirit.
squares stories want
I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being.
irritation mind levi-strauss
Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.
art not-good-enough good-enough
In art, 'good enough' is not good enough.
book return sanity
Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
thinking times-are-changing people
All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
letting-go reading dark
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.
wise ends claims
To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
dragons hunger hard
The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.
art writing practice
Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.
children wall real
There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
kingdoms forests
There is no kingdom like the forests.
quiet-voice despair speak
Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.
needs knows
It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.