A book is a box of words until you open it.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

A book won't move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. A book won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a good novel well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is a collaboration, an act of participation. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. Furthermore, she wept in pain, because she was free.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Aeneas' mother is a star?"" No; a goddess." I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus." He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. "So do we, he said. "But Venus also became more... With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite... There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light..." It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The ASEAN word for world is also the word for forest.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Age and illness made one a dualist

— Ursula K. Le Guin

All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

All her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

All that grieved me - that I was half one thing and half another and nothing wholly - was the sorrow of my childhood, but the strength and use of my life after I grew up.

— Ursula K. Le Guin