Ursula K. Le Guin Doe Quotations

Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced.

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.

Morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.

Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place.

One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.

The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.

If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself.

It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.