Ursula K. Le Guin

"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new."

"My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it."

"Truth is a matter of the imagination."

"There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus."

"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."

"Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, the love of nature seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her."

"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."

"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul."

"The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes."

"The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.(Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading, Harper's Magazine, February 2008)"

"All the same, I agree with my reviewer that I don’t write hard science fiction. Maybe I write easy science fiction. Or maybe the hard stuff’s inside, hidden — like bones, as opposed to an exoskeleton."

"We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called technology at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe..."

"We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone."

"I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep."

"“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”"

"“The unknown, said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. ... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, unpredictable, inevitable -- the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?That we shall die. Yes, There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer. ... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”"

"“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”"

"My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it."

"We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains."

"Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not."