Ursula K. Le Guin Bot

She found that their company revived her, carried her away from the constant presence of last night's terror, little by little, till she could begin to look back on it as something that had happened, not something that was happening, that must always be happening to her.

“She'll die.”
“Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.”

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.

“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.”

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together.

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things.

I prefer to save talking till I know what I’m talking about.

No wizardry would serve him now, but only his own flesh, his life itself, against the unliving.

And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change.

There is no death for an otter, only life to the end.

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.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls.

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.

A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.

Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it.

The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

He had always loved her, but had not understood that he loved her beyond anyone and anything. When he was with her, even when he was down on the docks thinking of her, he was alive.

To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side.

Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience.

The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.

And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea.

The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

As he came to the bank Ogion, waiting, reached out his hand and clasping the boy’s arm whispered to him his true name: Ged.

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?

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.

All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.