Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

The only thing worse than not reading a book in the last ninety days is not reading a book in the last ninety days and thinking that it doesn't matter

Some people have theorized that I lurched to prove myself intellectually. But it was not any lurch. It was more a kind of awakening.

In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights of a mind of uncommon excellence. It is impossible that we can be much accustomed to such companions without attaining some resemblance to them.

Books have always a secret influence on the understanding; we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas; he that reads books of science, thogh without any fixed desire of improvement, will grow more knowing.

Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true.

It takes suffering to widen the soul.

Truth takes the stamp of the souls it enters. It is rigorous and rough in arid souls, but tempers and softens itself in loving natures.

Books can warm the heart with friendly words and counsel, entering into a close relationship with us which is articulate and alive

As a kid books changed how I looked at the world and helped me understand things. Books still deepen me and open my heart.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely

The highest branch of solitary amusement is reading; but even in the choice of books the fancy is first employed; for in reading, the heart is touched, till its feelings are examined by the understanding, and the ripening of reason regulate the imagination. This is the work of years, and the most important of all employments.

The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing, let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book, I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.

I love the way that each book -- any book -- is its own journey. You open it, and off you go. You are changed in some way, large or small, by having traveled with those characters.

Knowledge is praised and desired by multitudes whom her charms could never rouse from the couch of sloth; whom the faintest invitation of pleasure draws away from their studies; to whom any other method of wearing the day is more eligible than the use of books, and who are more easily engaged by any conversation than such as may rectify their notions or enlarge their comprehension.

I think it was simply word of mouth that made it a New York Timesbestseller for more than 60 weeks, over a year. People being moved and changed and transformed by the book [One Thousand Gifts] and wanting to share that with hurting people all around them.

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

We don't simply read books. We become them.

The way I challenge myself is by writing something that really engages me, that doesn't have an easy answer, and isn't always an easy book to write.

Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.

Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings.

Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.

Making art is a rite of initiation. People change their souls.

You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.

Sometimes it's an external approach where one can learn the skills required, let's say, learn to play the trumpet and in that process other things happen. It's magical: through the process of practicing four hours a day you start focusing on emotion and when you pick up the trumpet it's filled with feeling.