I had of course met with incredulity... , but seldom with a will to incredulity.
There is no death for an otter, only life to the end.
The strange fortune of my lynx brought him to live in an artificial environment, a human community utterly foreign to him. His isolation from his natural, complex wilderness habitat is grievous and unnatural. But his aloofness, his aloneness, is the truth of his own nature. He retains that nature, brings it among us unchanged. He brings us the gift of his indestructible solitude.
The elimination of war. Did the Ancient Hainish postulate that continuous sexual capacity and organized social aggression, neither of which are attributes of any mammal but man, are cause and effect?
She was so elaborately and ostentatiously a female body that she seemed scarcely to be a human being.
I do not know what makes a man a traitor. No man considers himself a traitor: this makes it hard to find out.
Like all the King’s House this room was high, red, old, bare, with a musty chill on the air as if the drafts blew in not from other rooms but from other centuries.
Violence gains nothing, killing wins nothing – only sometimes nothing is what people want. Death is what they want. And they get it.
I write science fiction because that is what publishers call my books. Left to myself, I should call them novels.
Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on.
Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.
Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
Q: You are at the height of a very fruitful career. You’ve already had a huge influence on many writers and readers. What do you hope your legacy will be? LE GUIN: Irreverence toward undeserved authority, and passionate respect for the power of the word.
Speech is silver, silence is gold.
Ged stood still a while, like one who has received great news, and must enlarge his spirit to receive it.
No one, no matter how strong or wise or great, can rightly own and use another.
There was no going back and no going forward, so he must turn aside. Though he was one of them, he could no longer live with the People; though he had become one of them, he did not want to live with the historians. So he must go live among the Aliens.
The unexpected is what makes life possible,” he said.
Because I did see him. And not you. You’re almost nothing in my poem, almost nobody. An unkept promise. No mending that now, no filling your name with life, as I filled Dido’s. But it’s there, that life ungiven, there, in you. So now, at the end, when it’s too late, you have it to give to me.
There are too many ants, we think, reaching for the spray, when it is equally true that there are too many humans.