Ursula K. Le Guin

The gap that’s opened I’m filling with fairy dust, hues of the heart and a joy for life what was… I invite to exit right quietly, in shades of black and white.

Birth and death are so closely related that one could not destroy either without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that makes creation possible.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?

No matter how often you are defeated, you are born to victory.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

She is but half a wife that is not, nor is capable of being, a friend.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.