Selected Ursula LeGuin Quotations
• We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
• The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
• The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.
• There are no right answers to wrong questions.
• It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.
• The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both.
• The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerant uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
• I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
• Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
• If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
• Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
• What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
• Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.
• To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
• The creative adult is the child who has survived.
• My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.
• It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
• Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.
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About These Quotes
Quote collection assembled by Jone Johnson Lewis. Each quotation page in this collection and the entire collection © Jone Johnson Lewis 1997-2009. This is an informal collection assembled over many years. I regret that I am not be able to provide the original source if it is not listed with the quote.
Citation information:
Jone Johnson Lewis. "Ursula LeGuin Quotes." About Women's History. URL: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/ursula_leguin.htm . Date accessed: (today). (More on how to cite online sources including this page)
