Ursula K. Le Guin

We live well in the houses, well enough, but we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars. Now, we dare not go 100 miles from home. We keep a little knowledge and do nothing with it, but once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life.

But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.

To light a candle is to cast a shadow...

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

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

I went to the springs while the sun was still up, and sitting on a rocky outcrop above the cave mouth I watched the light grow reddish across the misty pools, and listened to the troubled voice of the water. After a while I moved farther up the hill, where I could hear birds singing near and far in the silence of the trees. The presence of the trees was very strong...The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.

In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.

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.

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well.

Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.

Sure, it's simple writing for kids_just as simple as bringing them up.

I write with all my heart

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists_ relationship is essentially with their work _ not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.