Ursula K. Le Guin Philosophical Quotes — Page 5

Author, Poet, Essayist

Philosophical

“No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.”

Men Inspirational Life

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Ursula K. Le Guin

Author, Poet, Essayist

Philosophical

“If your voice is heard by more people because you've earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.”

Names Voice Betrayal

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Philosophical

“To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”

Perfect Knowing

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Philosophical

“Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.”

Fiction Science Fiction

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Philosophical

“That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.”

Trying Kings Dueling

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Philosophical

“I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.”

Believe Character Song

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Philosophical

“The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.”

Country Important Reading

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Philosophical

“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.”

Believe Different Reading

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Philosophical

“The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.”

Journey Cells Starting Over

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Philosophical

“My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.”

Soul Sea Beer

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Philosophical

“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.”

Fall Wind Clouds

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Philosophical

“Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.”

Lying Gaps Twisted

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Ursula K. Le Guin — Philosophical Quotes

Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes