Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929–2018) was an American novelist, poet, and author of science fiction, fantasy, and children’s tales. She published over 100 short stories, 20 novels, 11 children’s books, six volumes of poetry, and four volumes of translation.
Le Guin is renowned for her cheerful, Taoist vision of the future. Her writings revealed that even the most oppressive conditions could be reinstated to fullness through balance and assimilation of opposites. Her novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969,) now taught commonly in high schools and colleges, is set on a planet whose humanlike natives are neither male nor female—these hermaphrodites experience gender only briefly in the course of procreation.
Le Guin created fantastic worlds in her novels and brought strong-willed, feminist protagonists into the limelight. Her assessment of male power and its social consequences (conflict, aggression, and authority) made her very influential in feminist circles. Her works of science fiction and fantasy include the Hainish trilogy (Rocannon’s World, 1966; Planet of Exile, 1966; and City of Illusions, 1967) and the best-selling Earthsea series (beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968.)
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Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?…if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Writing
I doubt the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, that child would grow up to be an eggplant.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Imagination
To oppose something is to maintain it…You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Acceptance
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
—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.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Love
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Compassion, Accomplishment
Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
—Ursula K. Le Guin
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Topics: Doubt, Uncertainty
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